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LIBRARYOFCONGRESS. 

Slielf-XS. 

UNITED STATES OF AMEKICA. 




FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE. 



LEADERS OF THOUGHT 



IN THE MODERN CHURCH 



REUEN THOMAS 

Author of " Through Death to Life," " Divine 
Sovereignty," etc. 



I 



BOSTON 

D LOTHROP COMPANY 

WASHINGTON STREET OPPOSITE BROM FIELD 






Copyright, 18S2, 

BY 

D. LoTHBOP Company. 



To THE Officers 

OF 

HAKVARD CHURCH AND CONGREGATION 

WHOSE LOVE AND CONFIDENCE HAVE 
BEEN A STIMULUS TO ME DURING 
THE YEARS OF MY RHNISTRY 
IN BROOKLINE • 



I bebkal-e t^is booh 



PEEFATORY NOTE. 



The critical reader will discover that these Essays 
bear internal evidence of having once been discourses 
addressed to an audience. That fact accounts for 
their style being what it is, and for the inweaving 
into their texture of personal experiences, which 
characteristics might not be so legitimate if they 
were literary essays pure and simple. 

Keuen Thomas. 
Harvard Church, Bkookltne, 
June, 1892. 



CONTENTS. 



I. 

JONATHAIff EDWARDS 7 

II. 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHAINING .... 25 

III. 
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 48 

IV. 

THOMAS CHALMERS 69 

V. 
FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON .... 96 

VI. 
EMANUEL, SWEDENBORG 121 

VII. 
HORACE BUSHNELL 143 

VIII. 
FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE .... 166 



LEADERS OF THOUGHT 
IN THE MODERN CHURCH 



I. 

JONATHAN EDWAEDS. 

THAT Jonathan Edwards was the most 
celebrated of American metaphysicians 
and divines whi^ih the eighteenth century pro- 
duced, is admitted everywhere. He was born 
at East Windsor, Conn., October 5, 1703, and 
lived in this world till 1758. His father 
was a clergyman, the Eev. Timothy Edwards. 
His mother was the daughter of a clergyman. 
He had ten sisters to keep him iif good spirits 
in his dejected hours — probably to torment 
the life out of him at all hours. He must 
have been mentally precocious, for as early as 

7 



8 JONATHAN EDWARDS. 

his eighth or ninth year we find him debating 
with himself about certain doctrines of the 
Christian religion. In his sixteenth year he 
had made himself acquainted with one of the 
masterly books of the world, ^' Locke on the 
Understanding." This book awoke his mind 
in a remarkable degree, and started him on the 
road along which he afterward traveled as a 
leader — the road of abstract thought. I hope 
that the word " metaphysician '' will not 
frighten you, though it is a word which ap- 
plies more closely to Jonathan Edwards than 
to any other American mind. I am not about 
to make any attempt to enter into the subtle- 
ties and profundities of his thinking. But as 
more than any other man he stands as the rep- 
resentative of the New England of the past, if 
not of the present, it will be fitting that we 
should try to get a glimpse or two into the in- 
ternal man before we have done with him. 

As to the facts of his life, these may be re- 
called. From fourteen years of age to twenty 
he was a student at Yale College. He seems 
to have received a license to preach at twenty 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 9 

years of age. His first appointment lasted 
only about eight months. He deemed himself 
unsuited to it^ and retired. For two years he 
was tntor in the college at New Haven. He 
then received an invitation to be colleague 
with his grandfather at Northampton. He 
continued in that town for twenty-four years, 
and resigned because he could not induce par- 
ents to keep bad books out of the hands of 
their children ; which bad books, he averred, 
hindered the workings of the Spirit of God 
among the young. After that he was engaged 
by a society which had its headquarters in 
London, England, and gave himself to the 
preaching of th^ Gospel to the Housatonic 
Indians, at Stockbridge. This simple fact, 
that a man of so much eminence that on the 
report of his retirement from Northampton he 
was immediately invited to go and take up his 
residence in Scotland, afterward engaged him- 
self as a missionary to the outcasts of society, 
speaks volumes for the meekness of the man. 
However, good came out of the evil, as, during 
the six years of his missionary work among the 



10 JONATHAN EDWARDS. 

Indians, he devoted his leisure time to those 
studies which issued in the book associated 
forever with his name, a book which ranks 
among the great books of the world — that 
on "The Freedom of the Will." This book 
was published in 1754. I wonder if any of 
you have ever read it. And further, I am 
curious to know how many there are among 
us who could begin it and hold on to it steadily, 
sentence by sentence, and chapter by chapter, 
to the end ? There is no milk for babes in that 
book, and even men must have first-class mas- 
ticating power and a most robust digestion to 
appropriate and assimilate such strong meat. 
In four years from the time of the publication 
of the book, which among thinkers immortal- 
ized him, he was offered the presidency of 
Princeton College, New Jersey. But he had 
scarcely begun his incumbentship before he 
died. There was much of that terrible disease 
we know by the name of small-pox in the 
neighborhood. He submitted to a preventive 
treatment, but it took an unfavorable turn in 
a constitution doubtless enfeebled by long and 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 11 

continuous studies, and soon the greatest meta- 
physician New England has produced ceased 
from all terrestrial labors. At fifty-five years 
of age he departed hence. 

Not only as a thinker was Jonathan Edwards 
great, but as a preacher also. It does not by 
any means follow that a great thinker will 
necessarily be a great preacher, or even a mod- 
erately good preacher. Some men, in the wis- 
dom of divine providence, are intended to be 
teachers of teachers. Some of us may have 
had very disappointing experiences in the mat- 
ter of preaching when it has been done by men 
whose reputation as thinkers has been of the 
highest. To have the thought and so to be 
able to express it as that it shall command the 
attention and interest the feelings of a gen- 
eral assembly is a combination of endowments 
very rare to find. The following estimate of 
him as an orator is supposably correct : '' As 
an orator he sometimes held not only the feel- 
ings but the intellects of his hearers com- 
pletely under his sway. The extraordinary 
influence which he thus exercised was not due 



12 JONATHAN EDWARDS. 

to any personal advantages ; for even when his 
oratory was most effective the ' contemptible- 
ness of his speech and demeanor' still re- 
mained, although it was no longer felt by his 
hearers ; nor to any special excellencies of 
style, for though his language conveyed his 
meaning without ambiguity, it did so not only 
without any of that peculiar felicity of ar- 
rangement which is usually one of the chief 
elements of successful oratory, but in a bald, 
even in a lumbering and awkward manner. 
His eloquence was simply ' intense moral earn- 
estness ' expressed in the form of what in more 
senses than one might be called ^merciless 
logic' His own description of himself, per- 
sonally, is that he had ^ a constitution in many 
respects peculiarly unhappy ; attended with 
flaccid solids — vapid, sizy, and scarce fluids, 
and a low tide of spirits, often occasioning a 
kind of childish weakness and conteraptible- 
ness of speech, presence and demeanor.'" 
Those who were his contemporaries have de- 
scribed him as a powerful and impressive 
preacher, somber and even gloomy in his re- 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 13 

ligious opinions and sentiments, but earnest, 
unaffected, and nobly conscientious. He seems 
to have been the author of that method of 
church work which is characteristic of New 
England, known as the 'revival' method. 
Every now and again, generally once a year, 
special services have been held, called revival 
services. To secure a revival is that toward 
which many pastors work. The method seems 
to have arisen out of a wave of religious en- 
thusiasm which passed over his own parish in 
1740-41. It has been remarked, however, that 
even in the case of one so great as Dr. Edwards 
there seem to be inevitable dangers attending 
this high-pressure system. It was but a few 
years after this great revival that obscene 
books were so general among the young of his 
parish that, rather than seem to tolerate them, 
he retired from his post. Lest it should be 
inferred by some that, personally, I am not in 
sympathy with revival methods, let me Here 
say that I trust that I am in sympathy with 
everything that is real. When a revival is 
real it is of a nature which indicates that there 



14 JONATHAN EDWARDS. 

is a more than ordinary spiritual power work- 
ing on the hearts of the people. The very 
idea of it is that it is something exceptional. 
That being so, it is not something, I take it, 
dependent on the will of man. It is not any 
thing we can begin or end. If the conditions 
are such that the Spirit of the Most High can 
work in an exceptional way, let us believe and 
rejoice. But to " get up a revival " seems to 
me something closely akin to impiety. I have 
known what it is to have a whole year of re- 
vival. It came of itself, or rather as God 
willed it — as the fruit of continuous and, as 
I believe, faithful work on behalf of the 
church. There was no effort after it, no extra 
services ; not the first attempt at excitement. 
It was a rain from heaven. And the state of 
mind it produced was one of humility and ten- 
derness and rejoicing of heart. I should prefer 
to name all special services evangelistic services 
— services intended specially for bringing in- 
fluence to bear on those who are outsiders. 
Beyond these few remarks I cannot now enter 
on this question. 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 15 

We must devote the rest of our time to try- 
ing to form some simple, but for us it may be 
sufficient, estimate of the character and mind 
of this fountain of New England orthodoxy — 
for such, T suppose, we must regard hira. 
Evidently he was a good deal of a recluse. 
He must have been. It was not possible for 
a man of such studious habits to be in society 
very much. His books were his real com- 
panions, and his teaching and preaching, when 
we come to analyze it, was a kind of introduc- 
tion of his companions to the members of his 
parish. The greatest of all English preachers 
in the latter part of the eighteenth century 
was Kobert Hall. He was a kind of Dr. 
Samuel Johnson in the pulpit. That for sixty 
years such a man should have diligently read 
and re-read the works of President Edwards, 
and have formed of him this judgment — 
" Jonathan Edwards unites comprehensiveness 
of view with minuteness of investigation be- 
yond any writer I am acquainted with. He 
was the greatest of the sons of men. He has 
none of the graces of writing, I admit j he was 



16 JONATHAN EDWARDS. 

acquainted with no grace but divine " — such 
testimony from such a man goes for an 
immense deal. 

Edwards was a severe logician. That must 
never be forgotten, and especially when one 
happens upon a sermon like that of his en- 
titled " Sinners in the hands of an angry God." 
I should think it must be the most terrific ser- 
mon that from a Christian pulpit was ever 
preached. One has said of that sermon : " I 
think a person of moral sensibility, alone at 
midnight, reading that awful discourse, would 
well-nigh go crazy. He would hear the judg- 
ment trump, and see the advancing heaven, 
and the day of doom would begin to mantle 
him with its shroud." 

The most wonderful effect was produced on 
the audience during its delivery. It is stated 
that the hearers groaned and shrieked convul- 
sively, and their outcries of distress once 
drowned the preacher's voice, and compelled 
him to make a long pause. Some of the audi- 
ence seized fast hold upon the pillars and 
braces of the meeting-house, as if that very 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 17 

moment their sliding feet Avere precipitating 
them into the gulf of perdition ; and a fellow- 
clergyman sitting at the time in the pulpit 
cried out : " ]\Ir. Edwards, Mr. Edwards ! Is 
not God merciful, too ? '^ Whether in these 
days we are better or worse than were the 
men and women of those times, I am not com- 
petent to affirm, but I feel confident that no 
congregation in the vicinity of Boston would 
now sit and listen to a sermon so terrific in its 
logical might as that most celebrated of all the 
sermons of the great Northampton divine. It 
may be that we need preaching of that kind, 
if only the man could be found capable of giv- 
insr it, but onlv a Jonathan Edwards could so 
preach ; for only a mind of the remorseless, 
logical power of his could possibly gather to- 
gether and keep in line the material which 
was necessary to make his applications of his 
theme possible. "It was a kind of moral in- 
quisition ; and sinners were put upon argu- 
mentative racks, and beneath screws, and, 
with an awful revolution of the great truth 
in hand, evenly and steadily screwed down 



18 JONATHAN EDWARDS. 

and crushed." It would seem to most of us 
that, with Edwards' views and opinions, it 
was next to impossible for him to love God, in 
any sense of the word love with which we are 
familiar. He had so profound and all-consum- 
ing a sense of awe that love was out of the 
question. Everything in his theology was 
foundationed on the idea of divine sovereignty, 
interpreted not as the New Testament war- 
rants us in interpreting it, but interpreted 
simply as the just ground of government, of 
law and of order. Everywhere in this world 
there was rebellion, which must be put down 
at any cost. Till the rebellion was crushed 
out or the rebels were in everlasting fetters, 
there was nothing else to be said to them 
about Deity than that he was angry with 
them every day. His ethical watchword was 
" duty." That which it was a man's duty to 
do he must do at any cost. Of course such a 
view of things would make men stoical and 
resolute. It would train up men of will and 
of determination. It would create and mold 
into form good fighting men, stern, unrelenting 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 19 

controversialists. It would give us men and 
women holding to their opinions with a te- 
nacity that was unconquerable. But would it 
give the New Testament type of Christian ? 
Read Edwards' most famous sermon, and then 
turn to the opening sentences of the Sermon 
on the Mount, or read almost anything which 
fell from our Lord's lips, and I venture the 
assertion that any man but the most unim- 
pressible must feel how different the spirit of 
New Testament Christianity from that of the 
theology of this Titanic soul. 

Logician as he was, it would not be difficult 
to show that Edwards was not consistent with 
himself. Possibly you may reply, " Who is ? " 
and remind me of what Emerson says : " A 
foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little 
minds," and that " with consistency a great 
soul has little to do." Certainly no two men 
could be wider apart than Emerson and Jona- 
than Edwards. The one was a magnificent 
logician, the other seems to have scorned logic 
as if it were the forbidden fruit on the tree of 
life. If inconsistency be a sign of a great 



20 JONATHAN EDWARDS. 

soul, Emerson himself must be crowned. 
Oftentimes he seems to have ejected his 
thoughts just as they came, without any, even 
the slightest, sense of their having any rela- 
tions — fathers or mothers, sisters, brothers, 
cousins or aunts. He was the most fastidious 
soul in all society, and yet as much an an- 
archist in the region of mind, as the men in- 
carcerated in Chicago in the region of property. 
In one sense Emerson may be viewed as the 
natural reaction from Jonathan Edwards. He 
of Concord collected together any quantity of 
material out of which to build a house for the 
soul ; he quarried stone ; he cut down timber 
of the very best j he brought into a heap all 
precious things — gems of rare quality and 
color — threw them at your feet, and said: 
"There, build your own house if you can; and 
if you can't, live out in the cold ; it is all you 
are good for.'^ Edwards laid a foundation, 
and laboriously built a house — a big, square, 
roomy, old-fashioned New England mansion, 
and said : " There, go in and live in it, or 
stay out and be damned ! " You might object 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 21 

that all the windows looked toward the north, 
that there was next to no sun in the house, 
and very little warmth ; that it was damp and 
chill, and must be, from the way in which the 
house was built ; but that, he would say, was 
no fault of his. God made the material, and 
it was a house adapted to human nature in its 
present condition. It was of no use to say to 
him, " Out of the same materials a house may 
be built with windows looking toward the 
south, a house full of light and warmth and 
cheerfulness, and of better design, in which 
birds will sing and flowers will bloom, and 
men, women and children can rejoice and be 
glad." That is exactly what these stern logi- 
cians refuse to see — that out of the same 
materials a much better and more cheerful 
house can be built ; a house more receptive of 
the cheering and fertilizing sun and air with 
which God has filled the universe. 

Yet, with all the deductions we are obliged 
to make from the form into w^hich his thought 
ran, I yet think that Edwards must take rank 
as the robustest mind New England has pro- 



22 JONATHAN EDWARDS. 

duced. He was a man of sublime courage. 
He spoke out his thought regardless of con- 
sequences. He proclaimed the absoluteness 
of Deity, and asserted that the Sovereign 
Creator had not only power but the right to 
act as he willed. If only Edwards had made 
it clear that the sovereignty of God was the 
sovereignty of right over wrong, of love over 
hate, of wisdom over folly, what a magnificent 
system of thought his would have been ! I, 
for one, have no objection to Divine Sover- 
eignty. To me the idea is full of comfort and 
of hope. I do not object to the idea of abso- 
luteness in the v/ill of Deity when I find from 
the lips of the Christ that God's will is my 
salvation, that he wills that all men shall be 
saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. 
To ascribe arbitrariness to Deity is to say that 
God acts according to the pattern we have in 
men of infirmity and something worse. Ed- 
wards seemed to teach that God was simply 
a " happy " being, removed from all participa- 
tion in the sorrows of his people. The word 
" happy " seems to me a weak word. There 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 23 

are sorrows that arise from imperfection, and 
there are sorrows that arise from perfection. 
The quality is different. There is sorrow 
which is only an element in perfectness. The 
divine sympathy means in some way the di- 
vine sorrow. As one has said, " happy " is 
an unfortunate and an " epicurean epithet." 
Edwards could speak of disinterested love to 
God as something seemingly obtainable by 
mortals in this state. " Disinterested " love 
is, of course, love that has no expectation of 
benefits arising from it ; no dislike of punish- 
ment or suffering which comes from the one 
loved ; it must arise above all mere gratitude, 
and must love the Being simply for what he is. 
When a logician discourses on such a theme, 
it reveals in his nature immensely more than 
the logician. Such disinterested love is not, I 
fear, possible to us of these days ; but when a 
man begins to speak of such a theme he is 
beyond all system ; there is something even re- 
pellent about systematizing love. The great- 
est of all great forces is thus outside all our 
theologic systems. And the conflict of our 



24 JONATHAN EDWARDS. 

own and of all days is to save the systems of 
the past and yet to let in the love and light 
of God freely upon human spirits. As a 
thinker, as a logician, as a metaphysician, 
iSTew England has produced no one greater than 
Jonathan Edwards. His place was in the 
eighteenth century; ours is in the nineteenth. 
We admire Edwards, but we bow the knee to 
One only — the Teacher of Edwards and of all 
others who have been truth-loving and truth- 
speaking men. 



11. 

WILLIAM ELLEEY CHAINING. 

WILLIAM ELLEEY CHANNING lived 
in this world of ours from 1780 to 
1842. His birthplace was Newport, R. I. He 
owed an immense deal to the ancestry imme- 
diately back of him. We are told that from 
his father he inherited a fine person, simple 
and elegant tastes,, sweetness of temper, and 
warmth of affection ; from his mother, who 
seems to have been a woman of more than 
ordinary endowment, he derived the higher 
benefits of that strong moral discernment and 
straightforward rectitude of purpose and action 
which formed so striking a feature of his 
character. As in so many cases of men who 
have had high character and great influence, 

25 



26 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 

his mother's training of him was constant and 
unremitting, exercised with a judgment and 
discrimination that in itself amounted almost 
to genius. Aside from his mother, he seems 
to have been indebted to the character of per- 
sons in lowly positions for some of the best 
influences which operated on his life. An in- 
valid Avoman ; a cooper who refused, though 
very poor, to manufacture articles used in his 
trade for containing ardent spirits ; a female 
servant who illustrated before his eyes the 
cheerfulness which true piety could bring with 
it — these were the influences which operated 
on his youthful temperament, and gave him 
views of people which remained with him all 
through life ; gave him, too, the interest he 
always had in the slave, the poor, and the 
sick. 

We have, in these brief lectures, to do with 
men as thinkers, and so with Channing in that 
capacity. A man may be of great influence in 
his day, and yet not be characteristically a 
thinker. Channing was a man of large benev- 
olence, and in that capacity is a most inter- 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 27 

esting character. But as a thinker how did. he 
stand ? Had he independence enough to be a 
thinker ; independence enough to retain pos- 
session of himself and of his speech so as to 
tell to others with sincerity and truth that 
which he saw and heard in the temple of 
truth ? It is evident that he had the inde- 
pendence necessary. Had he the power of 
vision which is necessary to the thinker — the 
power to look into a thing as well as at it ? 
Had he that spiritual discernment which looks 
through phenomena into the essential heart of 
things ? Had he that dissatisfaction with out- 
sides which compels a man to push inwardly 
and still inwardly^ until his mind linds some 
permanent ground for that he holds as truth ? 
These questions cannot be answered with a 
simple "yes" or "no." At the end of this 
lecture we may answer them more intelligently 
than at this stage in our inquiry. 

Perhaps this is the proper place to ask 
whether a minister has any right to do his 
own thinking — if he can — or whether he has 
simply to accept what men in other genera- 



28 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 

tions have said as sufficient, and sink himself 
in them ? Some of you will be astonished to 
hear such a question, but it is certainly as- 
sumed by some that thinking is no part of a 
minister's duty. His duty is piously to accept 
what others have thought, without asserting 
any individuality of his own. ''Your remark 
applies to the Church of Eome,'' some one is 
inclined to say. It applies elsewhere. It ap- 
plies to Protestant churches. There are many 
inconsistent Eomanists, but on all points on 
which the Church has given a deliverance a 
consistent Eomanist ceases from thinking. 
He has no liberty in regard to that on which 
the Church has given a dogmatic deliverance. 
He gives up his conscience and his intelligence 
into the keeping of the Church. But are we 
to do that, or anything like it in our Protestant 
churches ? Protestantism, as I understand it, 
claims for Jesus Christ and his moral and 
spiritual sovereignty over men that which 
Romanism claims for the Church and the Pope. 
We claim infallibility for Jesus Christ. Ro- 
manists claim infallibility for the Pope and 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 29 

the Ghurcli as speaking through an (Ecumeni- 
cal Council. Is it not easy to see that any 
eliurch which claims infallibility or finality 
for its standard is not Protestant but Papal — 
whatever name it bears ? A Protestant church 
has this as its controlling principle: "Holy 
Scripture contains all things necessary to sal- 
vation, so that whatsoever is not read therein, 
or may be proved thereby, is not to be required 
of any man as necessary to salvation." Now, 
if any minister is simply to be a receiver of 
other men's thoughts — is not himself a thinker 
— is not he forfeiting something that God has 
given him ? Is he not putting an authority 
between himself and God — an authority for 
which there is no authority ? Use all helps, 
certainly; get all the help you can out of 
other men whom God has largely endowed; 
but if I have any ability to be a thinker, I am 
of the conviction that my duty to God de- 
mands that I use that ability. Have I not 
the same right to examine the original Script- 
ures for myself that another man has, that 
other men in other generations had ? If any 



30 WILLIAM ELLERY CHAINING. 

man lias a right that does not belong to me, 
I want to see his credentials. Who gave an- 
other man a right to set himself up as a 
standard ? And if no one man has the right, 
have any number of ones the right ? If I do 
not go, supposing I can get there, to Jesus 
Christ himself, if I do not listen to his words, 
examine his deeds, put myself in as close pro- 
pinquity to him as I am able ; if I, believing 
the Scriptures were given through men so in- 
spired as to be channels of divine truth, do 
not search those Scriptures, if I let another 
man search them for me and then accept him 
or any number of men as final — I, for my 
part, cannot perceive how I am accepting my 
Lord's command to come direct to him and 
find rest to my soul ; nor can I perceive 
wherein I stand on any other ground than 
that on which the Komanist stands : some 
Pope or some papal hierarchy stands between 
me and God's Christ and the Scriptures which 
contain and unfold him to my perception. 
Duty to Christ seems to me to demand that I 
give him a full and fair opportunity so to 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 31 

operate on my mind as that he can get all the 
truth into it of which it is capable. If I allow 
another man to come between me and him as 
an infallible authority, my allegiance is com- 
pound and not simple. If a man comes be- 
tween me and Christ as a pair of spectacles 
comes between short sight and the things seen, 
making it clear, that is the true helpful re- 
lation ; but if a man comes between me and 
God's Christ and stops me short at himself, he 
is an intruder. If he will not get out of the 
way I have a perfect right to run over hiin, 
even though he should say that it is a very 
heterodox proceeding. Now, in this sense that 
he who has independence enough, earnestness 
enough, sincerity enough, to think for himself 
is a thinker, Channing was a thinker, and 
has a right to be classed among the thinkers 
of the modern church. If a thinker is always 
a man of great reverence, with the spirit of 
investigation so developed in him that he is 
incessantly laborious in his perseverance, then 
Channing was a thinker. But he was not a 
profound thinker. The limit to his ability as 



32 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 

a thinker was soon reached. He laboriously 
trained himself to " the mastery of that copi- 
ous and vigorous style of composition to which 
his subsequent position in the world of letters 
is in no small measure due." His laborious 
culture of his mind seems to have kept him in 
that enfeebled condition of body which was 
chronic with him. 

His sense of responsibility was almost op- 
pressive, and he wrought with such full put- 
ting forth of his powers that everything of 
his seems to glow and burn with life. Though 
he takes rank with the Unitarians, yet I am 
informed that he would have much preferred 
not to identify himself with any theological 
party. It is a pretty hard thing for a man on 
whom is a party name to be held accountable 
for everything said and done by men bearing 
the same badge. Because, as a rule, every de- 
nomination is " run" — to use a word which is 
more popular than classical — by its smallest 
men ; men who are very fond of place and 
office ; good men who are not great men, and, 
as one says, " Goodness which is not greatness 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 33 

also is a sad misfortune " ; it is, when it gets 
into any place of leadership. How often we 
hear the remark as an apologetic for some act 
which is as faulty in judgment and as bad in 
spirit as it well can be, '• But So-and-so is such 
a good man ! " A small, good man, with an 
obstinate conscience, in a place of influence 
can do more harm in a few years than can 
be rectified in a lifetime. When talking of 
"goodness" I am inclined often to say, "There 
is none good save one, Jesus Christ." Observe 
how all his goodness was greatness too. Con- 
scientiousness is not the whole of Christi- 
anity ; it is a very small part of it. A very 
small man all conscience is a hedgehog — all 
spikes. My conviction is that St. Paul knew 
what he was talking about when he put that 
most human and divine thing, " love," above 
everything, and said that, practically, without 
it a man was not of much account. Kow, when 
Channing, with great reverence for such men 
as Dr. Hopkins and Dr. Stiles, could not 
follow them, but must study the character of 
Christ and the Scriptures for himself, and act 



34 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 

and preach, according to his individuality, he 
was largely moved to it by the emphasis which 
he found everywhere in Scripture on love of 
the brotherhood — God's love for man, God 
sending Jesus Christ to seek and to save man. 
Scripture did not put its great emphasis on 
this, " Be conscientious," but " Be Christian, 
love God and love man because he is God's 
man, and great shall your reward in Heaven 
be." Channing never seems to have pene- 
trated into what we may call the metaphysics 
of theology. The doctrine of a Trinity in the 
divine nature was beyond him ; the why and 
wherefore of an atonement he could not under- 
take to affirm ; and so he confined himself 
pretty much to such expressions as these: 
" The blood of Christ was shed for souls ; " 
^'The Son of God himself left the abodes of 
glory and expired a victim on the cross." 
Always and everywhere he seemed to worship 
Jesus the Christ as the unique Son of God, 
and to be entranced by the practical benevo- 
lence of his life, by his self-sacrifice, by his 
disinterested offering of himself on the altar, 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 35 

a victim for man ; but very seldom do you 
find him wrestling in the great deeps of theo- 
logic thought, like Edwards, or like that most 
fascinating of all modern writers on the Atone- 
ment — John McLeod Campbell. Channing 
believed in Christ's pre-existence, and that he 
came down from Heaven for man's salvation, 
and he taught " that the Scriptures ascribe 
the remission of sins to Christ's death with an 
emphasis so peculiar that we ought to consider 
this event as having a special influence in re- 
moving punishment — as a condition or method 
of pardon, without which repentance would 
not avail us, at least to that extent which is 
now promised by the Gospel." This is mar- 
velously near to being a correct setting forth 
of vicariousness in the sacrifice our Lord made 
of himself. Channing seems to have been a 
man who wanted to take what commended it- 
self to him as truth wherever he found it, at 
the same time to keep on the working side of 
all truth — the practical, benevolent, hospita- 
ble side. There is no little wisdom in that 
attitude. " I wish," he said in one of his ser- 



36 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 

mons, "to regard myself as belonging, not to 
a sect, but to the community of free minds, of 
lovers of truth, and followers of Christ both 
in Heaven and on earth — to stand under the 
open sky in the broad light, looking far and 
wide, seeing with my own eyes, hearing with 
my own ears, and following Truth meekly but 
resolutely, however arduous or solitary be the 
path in which she leads." 

And so it has come to pass that all truth- 
seeking men have been interested in Channing. 
Let us take only one testimony, and that from 
one of the most gifted men of modern times — 
I mean the late Rev. F. W. Robertson. In 
letter No. 65, in his biography, we find these 
words : 

" Dr. Channing^s life is full of interest. He 
had no adventures ; nor were his inward strug- 
gles, as detailed at least, very striking. He 
had taken immense pains with himself; but 
the nobler element of his nature was so 
strongly predominant that his life was steady, 
continuous victory. The purest love for man, 
the most unconquerable trust in human nature, 



WILLIAM ELLERT CHANNING. 37 

seem to have been the very basis of his being. 
He was a Unitarian ; but that is a very wide 
term, including a vast variety of persons think- 
ing very differently on essentials. I can only 
say that I should be very glad if half of those 
who recognize the hereditary claims of the Son 
of God to worship bowed down before his 
moral dignity with an adoration half as pro- 
found, or a love half as enthusiastic, as Dr. 
Channing's. I wish I, a Trinitarian, loved 
and adored him, and the divine goodness in 
him, anything near the way in which Chan- 
ning felt. A religious lady found the book on 
my table, the other day, and was horror-struck. 
I told her that if she and I ever got to Heaven, 
we should find Dr. Channing revolving around 
the central Light, in an orbit immeasurably 
nearer than ours, almost invisible to us, and 
lost in a blaze of light." 

Many other testimonies of this kind might 
be adduced from men of great spiritual in- 
sight who had no denominational affinities 
with Dr. Channing. To me it seems that the 
defect in Dr. Channing's teaching arose from 



38 WILLIAM ELLERY CHAINING. 

the fact that he had all his life long been with 
people who illustrated human nature on a much 
higher level than the average. Consequently 
he had no adequate views of the malignity 
there is in sin, and of the fearful wreck it 
makes of all that is human in this nature of 
ours. If he had been a missionary abroad, or 
even a city missionary at home in some of the 
worst parts of our great cities, and had seen, 
again and again, the moral, spiritual and 
physical wrecks which are everywhere to be 
met there, he would have spoken differently 
about human nature under the power of sin. 
Christ Jesus would have been, if possible, 
more necessary to him than he was. He would 
have realized more completely than was pos- 
sible to him, with his experience, the need of 
regeneration, and not simply reformation, for 
man. Reform and renewal are words express- 
ing differences that stretch to the roots of 
things. Channing was a great philanthropist, 
a great patriot, great in other departments, 
but I should not say that his thinking went to 
the roots of things. He moved in the sphere 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANGING. 39 

of that which was benevolent, practical, and 
immediately useful. In that region his in- 
fluence was immense. He was much like one 
for whom I have great admiration because of 
the purity and beauty of his character — Dr. A. 
P. Peabody. He seems to me almost the only 
living representative of the Channing type of 
New England clergy. The late Dr.' Sears, 
author of that most instructive volume, " The 
Fourth Gospel, the Heart of Christ," was 
another of the order. Perhaps the Rev. James 
Freeman Clarke approaches as near to the 
spirit of Channing as any modern man outside 
these. I should perhaps be more accurate if I 
were to say that could this eminent man and 
another man almost equally eminent — the Eev. 
Edward Everett Hale — be rolled into one, 
you would have Channing. It is not for me, 
however, to judge living men. I only give my 
impression. It seems to me that if Unitarian- 
ism had continued on the high elevation which 
it maintained in Channing, it would have had 
a different kind of influence from that which 
it has exerted. But I do not wish to invite 



40 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 

controversy. I could wish that we all were as 
clear-sighted on some matters as was Chan- 
ning. For myself, I confess to having great 
delight in his writings. They animate and in- 
spire me. That> the practical nature of the 
man may be evident, and as an illustration of 
the wise discrimination he makes, let us take 
one or two extracts from an address of his on 
Temperance. He includes other things besides 
those to which this word strictly applies. For 
instance, speaking of dancing, he has no ob- 
jection to it as a recreation conducted under 
the laws of gymnastics. But when he comes 
to speak of the ball-room he writes: "The 
time consumed in preparation for a ball, the 
waste of thought upon it, the extravagance of 
dress, the late hours, the exhaustion of 
strength, the exposure of health, and the lan- 
guor of the succeediug day — these and other 
evils are strong reasons for banishing it from 
the community." Then again he writes: "I 
approach another subject on which a greater 
variety of opinion exists than on the last, and 
that is the theater. In its present state the 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNIXG. 41 

theater deserves no encouragement. It is an 
accumulation of immoral influences. It lias 
nourished intemperance and all vice. I can 
conceive of a theater which would be the no- 
blest of all forms of amusements, and would 
take rank among the means of refining the 
taste and elevating the character of the peo- 
ple " (but he owns that it does not exist). 
Then he adds, taking facts as they are : " Is it 
possible that a Christian and a refined people 
can resort to theaters where exhibitions of 
daricing are given fit only for brothels, and 
where the most licentious class in the com- 
munity throng, unconcealed, to tempt and to 
destroy ? That the theater should be suffered 
to exist in its present degradation is a reproach 
to the community. In the meantime (he asks) 
is there not an amusement having an affinity 
with the drama, which might be usefully in- 
troduced among us ? I mean recitation. A 
work of genius recited by a man of fine taste, 
enthusiasm, and powers of elocution, is a very 
pure and high gratification. Shakespeare 
worthily recited would be better understood 



42 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 

than on the stage. Then, in recitation we es- 
cape the weariness of listening to poor per- 
formers, who, after all, fill up most of the time 
at the theater." 

And so, with just judgment and rare dis- 
crimination, he goes on to separate between 
the instructive and destructive. In our day 
people swallow anything and everything under 
the perverted and senseless idea of freedom. 
Cannot a man let alone indigestible things, 
and offal and garbage, and still be free ? Is 
he not exercising his freedom more by letting 
some things alone than by insanely appropri- 
ating them simply because he may ? The way 
in which some addle-pated people talk about 
freedom is enough to make the word disrepu- 
table. There is something necessary to life 
besides freedom — viz., intelligence, the trained 
ability to discriminate, the strength to refuse 
as well as to accept. On such practical mat- 
ters as these to which I have referred, Chan- 
ning is a most wholesome teacher and guide. 
His words have a tonic quality in them which 
we all sorely need. Take an admirable address 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 43 

of his on the Elevation of the Working Classes. 
I wish that every workingman in the land 
could be induced to read it and re-read it until 
it had become like a dose of iron in his blood. 
In my copy I find every third or fourth sen- 
tence marked as excellent. He speaks of ele- 
vation of soul as the only true elevation of 
man or woman anywhere. " That idleness is a 
privilege and work a disgrace," he says, "is 
among the deadliest of errors. Without depth 
of thought, or earnestness of feeling, or 
strength of purpose, living an unreal life, sac- 
rificing substance to show, substituting the 
factitious for the natural, mistaking a crowd 
for society, finding its chief pleasure in ridi- 
cule, and exhausting its ingenuity in expe- 
dients for killing time — fashion is among the 
last influences under which a human being 
who respects himself, or who comprehends the 
great end of life, would desire to be placed.'' 
If these words were necessary in Channing's 
day, how much more in ours ! " Labor," he 
says, " is a far better condition for the recep- 
tion of great ideas than luxurious or fashion- 



44 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 

able life." "There is no elevation without 
moral and religious principle." " What avails 
intellectual without moral power ? " All that 
is benevolent and practical in Channing's 
teaching is most admirable in quality. He 
thinks clearly and speaks with great precision 
and power in this region. It is only when he 
approaches the region of pure thought — that 
region in which Jonathan Edwards was so 
great a master — that he falters. He is one of 
those men who belong to us all. There are 
some men, let them have on them this badge 
or that, you cannot denominationalize them. 
They are too great to be ismatics or schis- 
matics. They draw all kinds and orders of 
men to them. Men see the light in them; 
they take knowledge of them that they have 
been with Jesus. I am speaking to you prin- 
cipally of men of this order. Channing was 
one of them. He had an eye to discern 
wherein the strength and weakness of men and 
nations lay. Whosoever is incapable of admir- 
ing the simple and Christian manfulness of 
Channing must be in a bad moral state. At a 



WILLIAM ELLERT CHANNING. 45 

time when it was a fashionable thing to exalt 
France because of the heroic conduct of a 
single Frenchman, he warned his nation 
against the fatal influence of French morals 
and manners. He dreaded above all things an 
alliance of these United States with France. 
And when it was thought to be the patriotic 
thing to sow the seeds of distrust against Eng- 
land, he as manfully uttered these words, 
showing a discernment which has so generally- 
been lacking as to the class of society in which 
the real, typical Englishman is to be found: 
" The character of England is to be estimated 
particularly from what may be called the 
middle class of society, the most numerous 
class in all nations, and more numerous and in- 
fluential in England than in any other nation 
of Europe. 

"The warm piety, the active benevolence, 
and the independent and manly thinking 
which are found in this class, do encourage 
me in the belief that England will not be 
forsaken by God in her solemn struggle. I 
feel myself bound to all nations by the ties of 



46 WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 

a common nature, a common father, and a 
common Saviour. But I feel a particular in- 
terest in England, for I believe that there 
Christianity is exerting its best influence on 
the human character ; that there the perfec- 
tions of human nature, wisdom, virtue, and 
piety are fostered by excellent institutions, and 
are producing the delightful fruits of domestic 
happiness, social order, and general prosperity. 
It is a hope which I could not resign without 
anguish, that the ' prayers and alms ' of Eng- 
land will ' come up for a memorial before God,' 
and will obtain for her his sure protection 
against the common enemy of the civilized 
world." 

These are brave as well as good words. 
They show us how Channing was more dis- 
cerning, greater and braver than most of the 
men of his time. While, for myself, I cannot 
stop where he stops in his thinking on the 
highest and subtlest themes of theology, yet I 
cannot withhold from him on that account my 
poor, but sincere tribute of admiration and 
gratitude for all that he was and did and spake. 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 47 

Before we have finished this brief course of 
lectures we shall encounter men who as think- 
ers were much profounder and greater than 
Channing; but, take him for all in all, he was 
a great and beautiful soul, in the truest sense, 
one of God's elect. 



III. 

JOHN HENEY NEWMAN. 

IN making a selection from many names in 
the hemisphere of the modern church, I 
have tried to select such as stand for different 
phases of thought and action ; or, as we might 
say, the heads of different schools of thought. 
John Henry Newman is the most respectable 
and most interesting name in that school which 
is known as the Oxford School, because it had 
its rise in the English University of Oxford. 
Pusey, Keble, Hurrell Froude, H. J. Eose, 
Oakley, and others were its leaders. The 
names of Newman and Pusey are the best 
known, and these two men were most influen- 
tial of all those who, though members of a 
church professedly Protestant, yet steadily 

48 



JOHN HENKY NEWMAN. 49 

fought against everything characteristically 
Protestant in it until they succeeded to no 
inconsiderable extent in persuading very many 
of its ministry and people to discard the name 
of Protestant altogether. The "movement" 
was known for a while as Piiseyism, although 
Dr. Pusey as to influence was second to New- 
man ; but the name of Newman was so easily 
elongated by a syllable which travestied it that 
no one dared to call the movement Newman- 
ism because it was clear that its opponents 
would call it Newmanianism. Then it became 
known as Kitualism, and as Anglo-Catholicism. 
From the first it was a movement toward 
Rome, and if it continued to move there was no 
logical stopping-place short of Rome. John 
Henry Newman represented the spirit and 
the logical consistency of the movement more 
honestly and thoroughly than any other man. 
The question has often been asked, " How do 
you explain it that a man like Newman should 
become a Romanist ; a man of so much culture 
and intelligence and ability ? " He has him- 
self answered that question in the most inter- 



50 JOHN HENKY NEWMAN. 

esting book he ever wrote — a book which 
would possibly never have been written but 
for an attack upon his honesty and straight- 
forwardnesS; made by the Kev. Charles 
Kingsley. It was hardly possible, in the 
absence of any explanation of himself, for 
a man like Mr. Kingsley to understand 
the order of mind which belonged to New- 
man. Kingsley was not characteristically 
a theologian, nor very much of an ecclesiastic. 
He was a manly man, who took the most 
charitable and common-sense view of every 
subject, and tried, in a simple, manly fashion, 
to serve God and his fellow-man. To him 
^Newman seemed so subtle and so evasive that 
the impression on Kingsley's mind was that 
such a man could not be true and honest. He 
might be an exquisite writer of English prosey 
a man of much personal magnetism, and very 
devout ecclesiastically ; but how can such a 
man be transparently honest and straightfor- 
ward ? Newman's " Apologia " is an answer 
to Kingsley's question — a very elaborate and, 
in one sense, an all-sufficient answer. 



JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 61 

Newman was born in London in 1801. Until 
the year 1845 he was a minister in the Episco- 
pal Church of England. In that year he united 
himself with the Church of Kome. Only a 
few years since he was made a cardinal in that 
church. Some thirty-five volumes, chiefly on 
ecclesiastical and theological themes, have, in 
the course of his long life, been published of 
his authorship. He has a brother four years 
younger than himself who moved as rapidly 
as himself, only in the other direction. This 
brother, Erancis William Newman, is an Oxford 
man, too, and was more of a scholar at college 
than John Henry, obtaining what is known as 
a double first classj— first class in classics and 
first class in mathematics. When it came to 
taking his degree he declined to sign the 
Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, 
resigned his fellowship, and withdrew from 
the University. This brother was afterward 
appointed classical tutor in Bristol College, 
then in Manchester New College, and finally, 
in 1846, his reputation for scholarship led to 
his being appointed to the Latin chair in Uni- 



52 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 

versity College, London, which he held till 
1863. He is the author of some twenty 
volumes on different themes, all showing ac- 
curate scholarship and great thinking power. 
It is seldom that one and the same mother 
has two such sons as John Henry and Francis 
William Newman — both starting from the 
same place and moving in exactly opposite 
directions; one becoming an advocate of the 
extreme rationalistic school, the other of the 
extreme dogmatical school. The same home 
and college influences operating on the minds 
of two brothers moving them in precisely op- 
posite directions ! Such is the mystery of life. 
When we take John Henry Newman's ac- 
count of himself we are saved from the danger 
of doing him injustice. The evidence is all 
in, and it is his own. From the beginning of 
his revelations of himself we cannot refuse to 
recognize that he was naturally superstitious. 
That remark may to a degree be true of us all. 
When people refuse to sit thirteen at table, or 
are affrighted at spilling salt, or refuse to turn 
a cat away from the house simply because it 



JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 53 

is black, it is beyond question that something 
of superstition abides in such natures. New- 
man writes of himself: "I was very super- 
stitious, and for some time previous to my 
conversion (when I was fifteen) used con- 
stantly to cross myself on going into the dark." 
He did not know where he got this practice. 
His imagination as a boy, he tells us, ran on 
unknown influences, on magical powers, on talis- 
mans. When he was ten years of age he 
began to write verses. He had a copy-book 
on the first page of which in schoolboy hand 
he wrote, "John H. Newman, February 11, 
1811. Verse Book." Between "Verse" and 
" Book " he tells us he had drawn the figure 
of a solid cross upright, and next to it is what 
may indeed be meant for a necklace, but what 
I cannot make out to be anything else than 
a set of beads suspended with a little cross 
attached. The strange thing is, he adds, " how, 
among the thousand things which meet a boy's 
eyes, these in particular should so have fixed 
themselves in my mind that I made them 
thus practically my own." 



64 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 

He speaks of these things as if there was a 
kind of predestination in them — as if they 
were indications to him of the way he was 
bound to go. This book "Apologia" was 
written, you will remember, long after he 
became a Romanist, and as tracing the order 
of ideas and feelings in him from the first. 
If these records have anything to teach us, it 
is surely this: that the earliest impressions 
made on sensitive and susceptible minds are 
as seeds out of which the future will grow, 
and that whatever appeals to the eye in child- 
hood is likely to have a more lasting influence 
than that which appeals to the ear. " When 
I was fifteen a great change of thought took 
place in me. I fell under the influence of a 
definite creed, and received into my intellect 
impressions of dogma which, through God's 
mercy, have never been effaced or obscured.'' 
He says in later life that he is still as sure of 
his conversion at fifteen as he was of his 
hands and feet. It is not necessary for our 
purpose to trace out step by step the progress 
of development in this man's life. He is a 



JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 55 

thinker only to this extent, that he impressed 
himself so powerfully upon the young men of 
his time while he was at Oxford, and made 
them in large numbers see as he saw and feel 
as he felt. 

His nature was very superstitious, to begin 
with. Then he had great imagination, which 
would be affected by that which was impres- 
sive and mystical in religious services and 
buildings and ecclesiastical hierarchies and 
orders. But, strange to say, along with this 
exuberant imaginativeness there was, even 
more than he himself seems to have had any 
idea of, but which his critics have all recog- 
nized, a logical faculty of exceptional strength, 
which would compel him, if he meant to have 
any comfort out of himself, to follow his prem- 
ises to their inevitable conclusions, wherever 
they led him. Then, also, his mind was subtle 
to such a degree that if he had been a lawyer 
he would, if he had wished to do it, have 
mystified almost any jury. This charge of 
subtlety borders so closely on the capacity for 
skillful Jesuitism that I should decline to 



56 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 

make it if it were simply an inference of my 
own, even though I held it most honestly. 

You shall judge for yourself by a single 
extract from his writings. He is speaking 
of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Episcopal 
Church of England, which, as a minister, he 
had signed. Nine out of every ten persons 
reading those Articles would affirm that there 
was no doubt of their evangelical, if not 
strictly Calvinistic character. It is evident 
that Newman, as he grows more and more to 
hate Luther and the Reformation, yet wants 
to retain his place in the Church of England, 
has much trouble as to his consistency on 
account of these articles of belief. After 
grappling with them over and over again, he 
is finally impressed with their vagueness and 
indecisiveness. Then he gets a step further, 
and writes : " The Articles are evidently framed 
on the principle of leaving open large ques- 
tions on which the controversy hinges. They 
state broadly extreme truths, and are silent 
about their adjustment. For instance, they 
say that all necessary faith must be proved 



JOHN HEXRY NEWMAN. 57 

from Scripture, but they do not say who is 
to prove it. They say that the Church has 
authority in controversies ; they clo not say 
what authority. They say that men are law- 
fully called, and sent to minister and preach, 
who are chosen and called by men who liave 
public authority given them in the congrega- 
tion ; but they do not add by whom the 
authority is to be given. They say councils 
called by princes may err; they do not deter- 
mine whether councils called in the name of 
Christ may err." 

Now, what are we to think of this kind of 
argumentation ? I should say — if T did not 
know whose words these were — that such 
argumentation indicated a man who had an 
end to gain, and meant to gain it by some 
means. This kind of argumentation would 
suggest, in any man but John Henry Newman, 
smartness, but scarcely honesty. What I mean 
is, that this is not an honest use of those 
Thirty-nine Articles. Supposing we should 
apply the same method to the ten commands 
of the moral law : " The Sixth Commandment 



5S JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 

says, ^Thou shalt not kill'; but it does not 
say thou shalt not make a pit in front of a 
little babe toddling about a garden, so that it 
may fall in and break its neck. The Eighth 
Commandment says, ' Thou shalt not steal ' 5 
but it does not say, ' Thou shalt not pay thy- 
self that which thou honestly thinkest ought 
to come to thee out of thy employer's money.' 
And as none of the Commandments say, 'Thou 
shalt not get drunk,' it leaves the matter an 
open question." 

There is an evident viciousness in this mode 
of argument which (I do not say in this case) 
would ordinarily indicate a mind capable of 
deceiving itself. No mode of argument in the 
ecclesiastical and theological region is fair and 
honesf which cannot be applied with good 
results in the commercial and m.oral regions. 
I do not wonder that a man like Charles 
Kingsley should have had serious doubts as 
to Newman's perfect honesty. Supposing 
the anarchists in Chicago should take their 
stand on this plea : " The Constitution of the 
State of Illinois says, ' Thou shalt do no mur- 



JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 69 

der/ but it does not say, ' Thou shalt not use 
dynamite when in the presence of a police- 
man.' '' I see no difference radically and 
essentially between Dr. Newman's method of 
treating the Thirty-nine Articles and the an- 
archists' method of treating the Constitution 
of the State of Illinois. I think I have said 
enough to warrant my affirmation that Dr. 
Newman had a mind of most marvelous sub- 
tlety. As our limits are soon reached, T must 
not forget the question which has been asked, 
"How do you account for it that a man like 
Dr. Newman could go into the Church of 
Rome ? " To answer this question we must 
recognize, not only the man's natural mental 
state, but also that he belonged, to begin with, 
to an exclusive church ; that he was born in it 
and nurtured in it ; also that he was educated 
at the most exclusive of all universities, where 
even laymen who would take the ordinary 
degrees in arts had to profess allegiance to 
this church. He did not start from Biblical- 
ism or pure Protestantism. His logical mind 
would necessarily ask. Why this exclusiveness 



60 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 

in my church? It can only be justified on 
the ground of its being the one and only true 
church. Is it ? Then would come inquiry 
into its history — diligent search, as we know 
there was. The results of that diligent search 
are given step by step in the " Apologia." I 
am minister of an exclusive church. This 
exclusiveness means that there is but one true 
church. Is my church the one true church ? 
Let me see. Then went on from day to day 
the process of search — from day to day, from 
year to year — until, in 1841, we find him 
writing in this wise : '' Such acts were in 
progress (within my church, i. e.) as led to the 
gravest suspicion, not that it would soon cease 
to be a church, but that, since the sixteenth 
century, it had never been a church all along." 
After that point was reached there was con- 
stant struggle with himself to avoid the in- 
evitable conclusion that with his views and 
opinions he would have to go elsewhere. 

Eventually he went into that church toward 
which for years he had been gravitating. Every 
step he had taken for years had been a step 



JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 61 

nearer to it. The more I examine into Dr. 
Newman's views and opinions, the more clearly 
I recognize his mental composition, his natu- 
ral superstitions, his extreme sensitiveness to 
everything which appealed to his imagination, 
his mystic reverence for everything which was 
impressive in services and orders, his subtlety 
of mind which could always ilnd a way out of 
a difficulty when it presented itself, and which 
enabled him to say on one occasion, in giving 
an account of himself, " I was not unwilling to 
insinuate truths into our church which I thought 
had a right there." When added to this I 
find in him a faculty seldom associated with 
these traits to which I have referred — the 
logical faculty — I do not wonder that John 
Henry Newman found himself eventually in 
the Church of Eome ; my only wonder is that 
scores of others did not go with him. With 
all that has been said about the refinement of 
Newman's nature, there was an intolerance in 
it which sometimes broke out into very ugly 
forms of expression; as when, for instance, in 
some reference to the great Dr. Arnold of 



62 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 

Rugby, he asked snappishly, "But was Arnold 
a Christian ? " Such a question shocks and 
startles one. It forces us to demand from 
such a man his definition of a Christian. 
AVhat is a Christian ? A man who trusts and 
loves the Lord Jesus Christ — or what ? New- 
man and his school did not believe for a mo- 
ment that men had a right to come to the 
Scriptures of truth and search them for them- 
selves, prayerfully and diligently, taking them 
as they stand. He and they seemed to have 
thought more of " the Fathers " and their inter- 
pretation than of aught else. Principal Tul- 
loch has remarked upon the total want of the 
" historic spirit " in the members of this school. 
" The Fathers " were taken without question. 
A heap of documents of varying authority, or of 
no authority, were put before the reader. The 
Ignatian Epistles passed unchallenged (most 
of them are regarded as spurious) and, in one 
way and another, play a significant part in the 
controversy. If a writing contained the asser- 
tion of what were called " Church Principles," 
this was ample guarantee of its excellence and 



JOHN HENKY NEWMAN. 63 

genuineness. " No movement ever started 
with, a larger begging of the question." 

It may well be asked, How could Dr. New- 
man accept the Romish miracles such as the 
liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius, and 
such (to us) absurdities ? Well, I positively 
do not know, save that, having accepted the 
dogma of the infallibility of the Church of 
Rome to begin with, everything else follows 
as a matter of course. He recognizes and 
argues for the correctness of all these Eomish 
miracles on the principle that there were 
miracles in our Lord's time, and therefore may 
be and are likely to be again. It is a mystery 
to me that Dr. Newman cannot perceive that 
the miracles of our Lord's time were all mir- 
acles of revelation — they all bring into most 
impressive form some great truth. These 
Romish miracles are mere puppet-show work 
by the side of them. Having spent the 
greater part of a week studying Dr. Newman's 
*' Apologia" and other productions of his, to 
try if I can really get some fresh light on 
this man and his mental history, I am obliged 



64 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 

to acknowledge that to me there is something 
sad and discouraging in the revelation of so 
accomplished a man swallowing everything 
which he finds in " the Fathers " as if it were 
more authoritative than the Gospel itself. 
He seems to start out with this premise: there 
is a visible and infallible Catholic Church 
somewhere — where is it ? Eventually he is 
certain that his own church is not it, and there 
is no other church but the Church of Rome 
which can be it. Where did his own church 
get the idea of its ministers being sacrificing 
priests ? From the Church of Eome. Where 
did it get its idea of the eucharist, of baptismal 
regeneration, of apostolic succession ? From 
the Church of Rome. It must, then, be a 
branch of this same church. But why secede 
from the mother church ? W^as not such 
secession schism ? Then he began to hate 
Luther ; the very name Protestantism became 
odious to him. His intensely logical mind 
carried him into the only consistent position 
for one holding his views. Those who did not 
go with him were in a logically untenable posi- 



JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 65 

tion. Newman alone, of all tlie leaders of the 
movement, followed out his premises to their 
conclusions. 

How do we know that his views and opinions 
are not true ? We know it because his views 
and opinions are not large enough to be true. 
There is a larger idea of catholicity than his, 
a larger idea of priesthood, a larger idea of the 
Church. The New Testament teaches that all 
who love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity 
belong to the catholic Church, part of which 
is in heaven and part on earth; it teaches that 
all believers are priests unto God ; it teaches 
that every true disciple of Christ belongs to 
the Church of Christ. These ideas are larger, 
wider, grander, more comprehensive than those 
of Newman, undeniably Scriptural, and so true. 
Only by receiving, by personally appropriating 
the larger truth can we be saved from the 
temptation to substitute something inferior for 
it. Concerning the book that Newman wrote 
on the eve of his reception into the Roman 
communion, " The Theory of Development," a 
book intended to be the explanation and justi- 



6Q JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 

fication of his course, one of the most accom- 
plished and profound of English theologians 
wrote to a friend : " I am surprised at X's 
wishing you to read Newman's book. It is a 
very able book, and one which is likely to pro- 
duce an effect upon young men. . . . But 
of all books I ever read, it seems to me the 
most skeptical ; much more calculated to make 
skeptics than Komanists, though probably it 
will make some of each class. The trouble is 
that we have not been setting God before us ; 
that we have been seeking ourselves in our re- 
ligion and in everything else. This system of 
Newman's, though to those brought up in it, 
it may be identified with all that is most holy 
and godly, will to us be a refuge from God, a 
more entire, hopeless pursuit of selfish objects. 
They want the living God, and they fly to the 
fiction of ecclesiastical authority ; they want 
to be delivered from the burden of self, and 
they run to the confessor, who will keep them 
in an eternal round of contrivances to ex- 
tinguish self by feeding it and thinking of it. 
To go anywhere for the sake of comfortable 



JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 67 

feelings is a deep delusion ; to go anywhere 
for the sake of truth is the greatest of all 
duties. I rose up from the book with a feel- 
ing of sadness and depression, as if I were in 
the midst of a country under a visitation of 
locusts." We can often enter into spiritual 
sympathy with men with whom we can have 
po intelligent or conscientious ecclesiastical 
affinity. In the progress of inward develop- 
ment souls often come into lonely places, into 
conditions of inward experience where each 
has to bear his own burden. At such times 
there is scarcely a hymn to be found more 
tenderly expressive than that of Newman's : 

*•' Lead, kindly Light, amid th' encircling gloom, 

Lead thou me on ; 
The night is dark, and I am far from home, 

Lead thou me on. 
Keep thou my feet ; I do not ask to see 
The distant scene ; one step enough for me. 

*' I was not ever thus, nor pray'd that thou 

Shouldst lead me on ; 
I loved to choose and see ray path ; but now 

Lead thou me on. 
I loved the garish day; and, spite of fears, 
Pride ruled my will : remember not past years. 



68 JOHN HENKY NP:AVMAN. 



" So long thy power has blest me, sure it still 

Will lead me on 
O'er moor and I'en, o'er crag and torrent, till 

The night is gone, 
And with the morn, those angel faces smile 
Which I have loved long since and lost awhile." 



IV. 
THOMAS CHALMERS. 

SCOTTISH Presbyterianisin has produced 
no man of the celebrity of Dr. Chalmers. 
Edward Irving was a more picturesque man — 
a man who, to the poet, would be more fasci- 
nating, a better subject for a poem or a novel 
than Chalmers. Mrs. Oliphant has given us a 
most captivating life of this, as Carlyle calls 
him, " the most brotherly of men " — for a time 
the assistant of Chalmers. What a unique 
thing it must have been to see these two 
mighty men together — one so richly endowed 
with vision and imagination, soaring away in 
the clouds in search of his Lord whom he fain 
would compel to come down to earth again ; 
the other a many-sided man, a man of great- 

69 



70 THOMAS CHALMERS. 

nesses so many and varied that a quotation 
from Sydney Smith might well apply to him 
— " He was not one man, he was a thousand 
men." Thomas Chalmers was born in 1780, 
and lived in this world till 1847. From the 
first he was a student, and somewhat preco- 
cious too, for he entered the University of 
St. Andrew's while only eleven years old. 
These Scottish universities, however, were at 
that time very little more than superior gram- 
mar schools, and Scottish boys could study 
hard without being greatly injured by it, hav- 
ing too much bone and muscle to be nervous, 
and knowing nothing of the luxuries of our 
modern civilization which do so much to en- 
feeble the system and give us hot and tyran- 
nous nerves. In his nineteenth year Chalmers 
was licensed as a preacher by the Presbytery of 
St. Andrew's. There is something almost piti- 
able and ridiculous about boy preachers know- 
ing so very little of life and its perplexities, 
temptations and cares — knowing necessarily 
so little of any lore except schoolboy lore, and, 
yet set to instruct matured or even aged Chris- 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 71 

tian people in the things of the kingdom of 
God. One wonders less at their audacity than 
at the folly of the men who license them as 
preachers. Of course Chalmers at nineteen 
might be mentally as percipient as ordinary 
men at thirty. Preachers, like poets, are born, 
not made, and the slumbering possibilities in 
the youth may have been detected by those 
wise men of the St. Andrew's Presbytery. 
He did not do much preaching for two 
years after receiving his license, but spent the 
winters in Edinburgh attending the lectures 
of the ablest professors at that University. In 
his twenty-fourth year he was ordained minis- 
ter of Kilmany, a small parish in Pifeshire, 
about nine miles from St. Andrew's. He 
added to his ministerial work courses of lect- 
ures on chemistry in St. Andrew's, illustrated 
by experiments. These lectures were very 
popular. His studies seem to have been very 
varied — in chemistry, in mathematics, in poli- 
tical economy, of which he was very fond, a 
study which he pursued so thoroughly that in 
1808, before he was thirty years of age, he 



72 THOMAS CHALMERS. 

had published a book entitled "An Inquiry 
into the Extent and Stability of National 
Eesources/' 

At thirty years of age severe domestic be- 
reavements, and a serious illness, which brought 
him near to death, laid him aside from all 
work for a year. During that year his mind 
underwent a great change. Up to that period 
his preaching had been more of the nature 
of exhortation to correct morals. From that 
time onward the higher elements of truth as 
set forth in the Gospels, in the teachings of 
Christ and his Apostles, were conspicuous in 
all his discourses. It was heart preaching 
thenceforth, not simply head preaching. He 
rose from his sick-bed a man consecrated to 
his work as never before. His whole soul 
seemed to be in everything he did. " He had 
seen the King in his beauty, and the land 
which is afar off." Henceforth the genius of 
his nature and his magnificent powers were 
devoted without reserve to the service of God 
and man. In his thirty-fifth year he was 
called to be a minister to the Tron Church 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 73 

and parish in Glasgow ; called only by a nar- 
row majority, for they did not like his exceed- 
ing Biblicalism. In the midst of the crowded 
population of Glasgow the man developed into 
that largeness of which he was capable. There 
was room for his greatness to show itself. 
His "Astronomical Discourses " — perhaps the 
most eloquent productions which ever fell 
from his pen or were poured out from his lips 
— thrust his fame up to a quite unparalleled 
height. They were published after being 
preached. Within a year nine editions and 
twenty thousand copies of the volume Avere 
in circulation. They carried his fame to the 
metropolis of England, and on his appear- 
ance in London in the following year he was 
greeted by enthusiastic crowds. From that 
time onward his fame remained. And it has 
continued. Scotland ranks no pulpit orator 
on a higher plane than he, judging from the 
marvelous influence which he had over every 
audience that came under the spell of his 
magnetic power. Moreover, there was no clap- 
trap, no trickery, no aiming at effects, in his 



74 THOMAS CHALMERS. 

methods. Everything produced in the pulpit 
was carefully prepared in the study — almost 
every word written ; but it was all his own, in 
method, style, diction, mode of utterance, and 
effect of utterance. The preparation was an 
exact laying down of the lines on which a great 
locomotive, with fierce coals all aglow at the 
heart of it, rushed to its destination, carrying 
with it freight, passengers, and all at a rate at 
which it would have been entirely impossible 
for them to travel by themselves. As one has 
put it, while Chalmers was preaching "there 
was no possibility of sailing up his stream. 
You must go with him, or you must go ashore." 
" He was full of his idea, possessed by it, 
moved altogether by its power ; believing, he 
spoke, and without stint or fear, often appar- 
ently contradicting his former self — careless 
about everything, but speaking fully his mind." 
His mind was so large, so capacious, there was 
room in it for so much, everything around 
him seemed anxious to contribute something 
to the stores within ; mathematics, poetry, 
])hilosophy, political economy — they stood 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 75 

round with imploring looks saying to him, 
Take me and use me, and in your employ I 
shall feel at my best, and be connected with 
the God who made me ; thus enriched, ennobled 
and glorified. 

To criticise preachers is a thankless busi- 
ness, and specially as everybody assumes it 
to be a business for which each has special 
aptitude. But when we have before us a man 
of Chalmers's greatness and competency, we 
are tempted to say a word or two, in spite of 
the seeming immodesty of its being done by 
one who occupies a humble place among the 
crowd. Chalmers died when I was a very 
small boy, and so I cannot speak of him from 
sighji or hearing. But I have spoken with 
men who heard him. From their accounts, 
and from all that has been written about his 
method and its results, it would seem that he 
had much to overcome before he could get 
himself fairly on the way. His accent was 
Scottish, and very provincial at that. At first 
there was no promise of what was coming. 
He stumbled into what he had to sav until 



76 THOMAS CHALMERS. 

some great thought lit the fire within, and 
then began the flowing and raging of the 
stream, carrying all before it. Some preachers 
can preach to the cultured few, some to the 
thinking and inquiring middle classes of 
society, some can command the ear of the 
populace or a section of it ; but it must be 
evident that he is the greatest as a preacher 
who can command all classes and conditions 
of men, for it must be clear that he appeals 
to the humanity in them and not to any sur- 
face differences. Moreover, the history of 
men of the pulpit shows that sectional men 
never are, nor ever can be, great preachers. 
It is the humanity in a man whicli makes him 
capable of that temperament without which 
you have the elegant essayist, or the literary 
critic, or the fastidious scholar, but not the 
real and true preacher. The real and true 
heart that was in Clialmers was shown after 
he had been at the Tron Church four years, 
when he expressed his earnest wish to be 
transferred to St. John's Church — a parish 
the population of which was made up princi- 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 77 

pally of weavers, laborers, factory-workers 
and other operatives. To this church he was 
transferred, and the artisans of that district 
had as their preacher the mightiest orator in 
all Scotland, if not in Great Britain. Here 
he wrought prodigiously to bring the two 
thousand families in this crowded district un- 
der the influence of the Gospel. He divided 
this great parish into twenty-five districts, 
with a deacon and elder for each district — 
the deacon to attend to the secularities, the 
elder to the spiritualities. At the commence- 
ment of his taking charge of this parish it 
cost for the sustenance of the indigent poor 
an amount equal to about seven thousand 
dollars a year ; at the end of four years the 
pauper expenditure was about one thousand 
and six hundred dollars a year. The idle, the 
drunken, the worthless, he summarily rejected 
after giving them a fair trial, and confined 
himself to encouraging and helping those who 
could, by a little wise help, be put on their 
feet and made respectable members of society. 
He soon found out that there were persons to 



78 THOMAS CHALMERS. 

whom money help was only demoralization. 
So long as others would help them they would 
not help themselves. They became chronic 
paupers, caring nothing for sympathy and ad- 
vice and encouragement, caring only for such 
loaves and fishes as came to them by the labor 
of some one else. These Chalmers left the 
civil authorities to care for as best they could, 
and reserved the church help and the visits of 
church helpers for people who manifestly had 
souls as well as mouths. But four years of 
such untiring labor as that he gave to this 
St. John's Parish broke him down in health, 
and he had to quit it, with a great load of 
experience which he has put into several 
volumes on the '-'Christian and Civic Economy 
of Large Towns," but with little strength left. 
Dr. Chalmers is an illustration of the fact that 
no man, though he have the strength of Her- 
cules and the eloquence of Demosthenes, can 
dribble out his mental and sympathetic strength 
drop by drop, drop by drop, every day of the 
week, and have a river full of it to pour over 
and into an exacting audience on Sunday. 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 79 

Dr. Chalmers had a whole army of assistants, 
and yet in four years he had to retire from 
this great and successful effort of his. When, 
at a meeting of students and ministers in Lon- 
don, the late Henry Ward Beecher was asked 
as to the possibility and utility of house-to- 
house visitation, he replied: "A man has only 
just so much vitality in his brain. If he 
spends it drop by drop all through the week, 
he cannot have it in any concentrated form 
on Sunday. There are communities where 
the average of knowledge is so low that the 
man as a pastor must sacrifice himself as a 
preacher, and must go round from house to 
house ; but 3'ou cannot, in one case in ten 
thousand, unite the two." I am sure Mr. 
Beecher is right. 

Any man preaching out of an exhausted 
vitality can never do much good to the intel- 
lects and hearts of his people. If we had a 
Scriptural ecclesiasticism, every man would 
find the work for which he is suited. The 
New Testament idea is one church in one 
town, with a varied ministry — of course more 



80 THOMAS CHALMERS. 

meeting-houses than one or two or three where 
the town was large. But nowadays we have 
to get on without being Scriptural, so far as our 
ecclesiasticisms are concerned. In 1823 Dr. 
Chalmers had to accept a Professorship of 
Moral Philosophy in the University of St. 
Andrew's. In five years more he was trans- 
ferred to the Chair of Theology in the Univer- 
sity of Edinburgh. As a Professor of Moral 
Philosophy he had especially insisted on this 
cardinal doctrine, " that a right moral condition 
is essential to a right economic condition of 
the masses ; " that character is the parent of 
comfort, and that consequently you can never 
get irreligious communities right by any read- 
justment of economic and social relations. It 
is the old principle, " Make the tree good, and 
the fruit will be good.'' 

That is where people who write on political 
economy and on socialism are ever making a 
mistake. Given ten thousand bad men, how 
to so arrange them that the total will be good? 
It is a hopeless problem so long as it stands 
so. During his professorships Dr. Chalmers 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 81 

was contiuually using his pen, and continually 
preacliing as Sundays brought him opportunity. 
Soon a crisis came in the history of his church, 
in which a leader of men was necessary. The 
civil and ecclesiastical courts came into col- 
lision. Incapable men were appointed to 
churches against the protest of congregations. 
The evil became unendurable. Finally, with 
Dr. Chalmers as their leader, on the eighteenth 
of iMay, 1843, four hundred and seventy clergy- 
men withdrew from the general assembly and 
founded the Free Church of Scotland. The 
first moderator was Chalmers himself. The 
remaining years of his life were given to build- 
ing up the Free Church and in perfecting his 
great work, " Institutes of Theology." These 
years were few. This great secession, the last 
great church movement in which conscience 
has been magnificently supreme over con- 
siderations of a pecuniary and social sort, took 
place in 1843. 

In 1847, Chalmers passed away, so peacefully 
that none were witnesses of his departure. 
On Sabbath evening, May 30, he bade his 



82 THOMAS CHALMERS. 

family good-niglit. Next morning, when his 
room was entered and the curtains of his bed 
withdrawn, he was found half-erect, his head 
leaning gently back upon the pillow, no token 
of pain or struggle, the brow and hand, when 
touched, so cold as to indicate that some hours 
had already elapsed since the spirit had peace- 
fully departed. 

Whether it be correct or not to call Dr. 
Chalmers an original thinker, it is certainly 
correct to affirm that the old thought became 
new in its interest and force when he passed 
it through the fervid alembic of his own mind. 
It has been well said that an old truth immedi- 
ately becomes new when you put it into prac- 
tice. The Christian religion immediately be- 
came a new power and force for the resistance 
of evil and the promotion of good when it 
found incarnation in the personality of Dr. 
Chalmers ; his book on the " Adaptation of Ex- 
ternal Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Con- 
stitution of Man " is a great work, had great 
influence, and shows great thinking power. 



THOMAS CHALMERS. od 

The power of his personality was great be- 
cause he was so simple and childlike in his 
nature. Like so many other men of first-rate 
genius, his childhood seems to have been pre- 
served and carried up into his manhood. He 
realized that which Coleridge says is the true 
condition of unsophisticated life — " Every 
man should include all his former selves in 
the present, as a tree has its former years' 
growths inside its last ; " so Dr. Chalmers bore 
along with him his childhood, his youth, his 
early and full manhood into his mature old 
age — if he can correctly be said to have at- 
tained to a mature old age at all. One who 
knew him well writes of him : " In simplicity 
he was a child. By simplicity we do not 
mean the simplicity of the head — of that he 
had none — but we refer to a certain quality 
of heart and of life which gives a directness 
to all actions and a certain beautiful uncon- 
sciousness of self — an outgoing of the whole 
nature that we see in children. D'Alembert 
speaks of it in Fenelon as a characteristic of 
him. It is a quality which renders the pos- 



84 THOMAS CHALMERS. 

sessor dear to others. Sincerity maj'' be hard, 
harsh and unlovable. Simplicity is more than 
sincerity. It affects neither virtue nor truth. 
It is never occupied with itself. It seems to 
have lost this Ego of which one is so jealous." 
Chalmers had no idea of looking after his " re- 
spectability " and " dignity " ; of keeping his 
status or maintaining his position. They who 
are thus occupied are invariably too self-con- 
scious ever to be for long either amiable or 
useful. Self-consciousness kills everything. 
No man or woman can do a thing well so long 
as they are conscious of thein selves as of any 
very great dignity or importance, or so long as 
they are conscious of doing the thing. To set 
one part of yourself to stand off and watch 
the other part of yourself is fatal to all effi- 
ciency. Gough used to say that he never could 
speak freely until he had lost all thought of 
himself and how he was doing a thing, and 
felt only the theme and the audience. I ap- 
prehend that is so with all effective speakers. 
This writer from whom I have quoted as 
personally well knowing Dr. Chalmers says : 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 85 

" He was, like Agamemnon, a native leader of 
men, and, with, all his homeliness of feature 
and deportment, and his perfect simplicity of 
expression, there was about him that divinity 
that doth hedge a king." You felt a power in 
him and going forth from him, drawing you to 
him in spite of yourself. There is to us a con- 
tinual mystery in this power of one man over 
another. We find it acting everywhere with 
the simplicity, the ceaselessness, the energy 
of gravitation ; it is proportioned to bulk, for 
we hold to the notion of a bigness in souls as 
well as in bodies — one soul differing from an- 
other in quantit}'" and momentum as well as in 
quality and force. Jonathan Edwards speaks 
of a man of spiritual influence as having more 
being than another. 

Dr. Chalmers's question often was, when 
asking about a man — " Is he a man of 
wecht ? " By " wecht " he meant force, 
energy, the suggestion of power. 

Generally such men as those to whom Dr. 
Chalmers referred in this word are men of 
capacious understanding, strong will ; an emo- 



86 THOMAS CHALMERS. 

tional nature, quick, powerful, urgent, undeni- 
able, in perpetual communication with the 
energetic will, and the large, resolute intellect ; 
and a strong, hearty, capable body — the mind 
finding its way at once and in full to the face, 
to the gesture, to every act of the body. 

And yet these endowments must never be 
held in statuesque stiffness, or they will im- 
mediately become feeble. In Dr. Chalmers's 
days and in his country they knew little, if 
anything, of vocal culture or of any kind of 
elocutionary training. The thing is good in 
itself as tending to give a man possession of 
himself, and to correct faults. But if it be- 
comes a harness on a man, in which he cannot 
move, except with a limited degree of freedom, 
or if it should become what is very much worse, 
a strait-jacket (corset, I believe, is the politer 
word), pressing in the ribs and creating de- 
formity, then I should say, away with it! 
The fastidious people of the world would not 
have endured Chalmers's provincialisms, but 
when the torrent of his mental power rushed 
down upon them, and submerged their self- 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 87 

consciousness, they might then have felt that 
he had " wecht," and that there was something 
divine in the man. 

Have you never observed how some people 
pass through life as if " all the world ^vere a 
stage, and all the men and women merely 
players " ? Every step of the way and every 
hour of the day they suggest the actor. And 
children, poor little mortals ! are taught to be 
actors — that is the worst of all the miseries 
of this wretchedly artificial life of ours. I 
think that our nineteenth century civilization 
never looks so hideous as when it has pro- 
duced a fashionable child — a little mortal with 
all the politenesses engrafted on its tongue, 
and all its sweet natural spontaneousness and 
simplicity gone. There is all the difference in 
the world between allowing children to be 
cruel and selfish and rude, and allowing them 
to be sweet and spontaneous and childlike. 

Does it not indicate how simple and child- 
like Chalmers was — the fact w^e are told of 
him that when, one Saturday, he was at a 
friend's house near the Pentlands, he collected 



88 THOMAS CHALMERS. 

all the children and small people — the other 
bairns as he called them — and with no one else 
of his own growth took the lead to the nearest 
hill-top ; how he made each take the biggest 
and roundest stone he could find and carry ; 
how he panted up the hill himself with one of 
enormous size ; how he kept up their hearts 
and made them shout with glee, with the light 
of his countenance, and with all his pleasant 
and strange ways and words ; how, having got 
the little breathless men and women to the 
top of the hill, he, hot and scant of breath, 
looked round upon the world and upon them 
with his broad, benignant smile ; how he set 
off his own huge " fellow " ; how he watched 
him setting out on his race, slowly, stupidly, 
vaguely at first, almost as if he might die be- 
fore he began to live, then suddenly giving a 
spring and off like a shot, bounding, tearing, 
acquiring strength in going ; how he spoke to, 
upbraided him, cheered him, gloried in him, 
all but prayed for him ; how he joked phi- 
losophy to his wondering and ecstatic crew 
when he (the stone) disappeared among some 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 89 

brackens, telling them that they had the evi- 
dence of their senses that he was in, they 
might even know he was there by his effects, 
by the moving brackens, himself unseen ; how 
plain it became that he had gone in, when he 
actually came out ; how he ran up the opposite 
side a bit, and then fell back and lazily ex- 
pired at the bottom ; how, to the astonishment 
of these little folk, he took from each his 
cherished stone and set it off himself, showing 
them how they all ran alike, yet differently ; 
how he went on " making," as he said, " an in- 
duction of particulars" till he came to the 
Benjamin of the flock, a wee, wee man, who 
had. brought up a stone bigger than his own 
big head ; then how he let him set off his own ; 
and how wonderfully it ran — what miraculous 
leaps ! what escapes from impossible places ! 
and how it ran up the other side further than 
any, and, b}" some felicity, remained there ? 
(See Dr. John Brown.) 

Who can read all this and not love Chalmers ? 
Here we see the child carried up into and held 
in solution in the man ; here, too, we get a 



90 THOMAS CHALMERS. 

glimpse into the secret of his greatness — viz., 
his sympathy with all life everywhere around 
him, with the life of children as with the life 
of the great striving multitudes of people in 
the crowded district of St. John's, Glasgow. 
In this we find him to be one with other great 
men his contemporaries in Great Britain. In- 
deed, it seems to be a sign of greatness, this 
practical sympathy with struggling humanity ; 
more than anything else does it betoken 
Christliness of spirit and largeness of soul. 
When I recall the names of other Scottish 
Presbyterians of modern days — men trans- 
lated to the majority — Norman McLeod and 
Thomas Guthrie — the same intense interest 
in the classes in society who are put at a dis- 
advantage shows itself. When, crossing the 
border, I think of other men who now no 
longer walk the streets of this Vanity Fair — 
Frederick Eobertson, Charles Kingsley, Fred- 
erick Denison Maurice — it is the same with 
them as with Chalmers. The question how 
can I help my fellow-men who are struggling 
and poor — this was an inquiry in which they 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 91 

never ceased to be interested. Dr. Hanna, the 
son-in-law of Chalmers, the compiler of that 
most interesting biography in which we get 
nearer to the heart of the great man than else- 
where, says of him : " The dearest object of 
his earthly existence was the elevation of the 
common people." 

Chalmers had studied political economy 
with a thoroughness possible to only few, and 
came from the study more than ever a believer 
in the disappointment and failure which must 
attend all social reforms that do not treat man 
as man ; namely, as body and soul. Men must 
be elevated morally and intellectually if they 
are to be elevated socially. It is this great 
radical fact which is too generally ignored by 
labor reformers and all socialists who are not 
Christian socialists. When Chalmers, with an 
insight which came of Christian perception, 
opened a Sunday-school in almost every street 
in his great, but poor district in Glasgow, so 
that the school should be in si^'ht of the homes 
of all the people, he did more in a few years 
to l*aise the moral tone of the district than 



92 THOMAS CHALMERS. 

could be done in a century apart from this ap- 
peal to the heart and mind of the people. I 
believe in every family having a home — a 
house, however small, complete in itself — in 
which they have independence and privacy. 
There is more moral influence in this than 
people think. Mats, lodging-houses, tene- 
ment-houses, et hoc genus omne, may be tem- 
porary necessities, but as permanent places of 
residence they are one and all demoralizing. 
There is too much Arabism in the world. 
We do not want to increase the number of the 
Arab class. Eeligion and morals have always 
been associated with, and always will be asso- 
ciated with home life. I venture the predic- 
tion that if ever we should have great social 
upheavals in the cities of this country, such as 
will shake society to its foundations, the city 
which of all others will suffer the least will be 
Philadelphia, because there are twice as many 
people who own their houses as in any other 
large city. I am further persuaded that 
ministers of the Gospel must take hold of 
these social questions to elevate them before 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 93 

ever tliere will be any peaceful solution of the 
economic difficulties which, threaten us as well 
as other nations. It is only once and again 
that a Dr. Chalmers rises into view, with great 
human sympathies joined to transcendent abili- 
ties ; but no one, or ten, or a hundred men, 
however plentifully endowed they might be, 
can do more than put a finger to the great 
work which God calls all Christian men to 
help to do. The writer in the " Encyclopsedia 
Britannica" says of Chalmers: "Various ele- 
ments combined to clothe him with public 
influence — a childlike, guileless, transparent 
simplicity, the utter absence of anything 
factitious in matter or manner, a kindliness of 
nature that made him flexible to every human 
sympathy, a chivalry of sentiment that raised 
him above all the petty jealousies of public 
life, a firmness of purpose that made vacilla- 
tion almost a thing impossible, a force of will 
and general momentum that bore all that was 
movable before it, a vehement utterance and 
overwhelming eloquence that gave him com- 
mand of the multitude, a scientific reputation 



94 THOMAS CHALMERS. 

that won for him the respect and attention of 
the more educated, the legislative faculty that 
framed measures upon the broadest principles, 
the practical sagacity that adapted them to 
the ends they were intended to realize, a 
purity of motive that put him above all sus- 
picion of selfishness, and a piety unobtrusive, 
but most profound, simple, yet ardent." 

Such a testimony indicates to us how varied 
and great were his gifts, and how thoroughly 
he consecrated them to the highest uses known 
on earth to man. The sense of greatness im- 
pressed everybody — great in his conceptions, 
great in his sweep of thought, great in his 
plans, great in his zeal — yet with it the beauti- 
ful unconsciousness that he was great. There 
are to be found quite a number of prompt, zeal- 
ous, earnest men up and down in our churches, 
but, as one has said, they are so unforgettingly 
self-conscious, " apt to run wild, to get need- 
lessly brisk, unpleasantly incessant. A weasel 
is good or bad as the case may be — good 
against vermin, bad to meddle with ; but in- 
spired weasels, weasels on a mission, are ter- 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 95 

rible indeed, mischievous and fell — ' fierce as 
wild bulls, untamable as flies.' " Chalmers 
did not like these men — they had not icecht, 
as he said. Weight was an essential thing 
with him. "When the sun sets," writes Dr. 
John Brown, in speaking of Chalmers, "he 
rises elsewhere — he goes on rejoicing like a 
strong man running his race. So does a great 
man ; when he leaves us and our concerns he 
rises elsewhere; and we may reasonably sup- 
pose that one who has in this world played a 
great part in its greatest histories, who has 
through a long life been pre-eminent for pro- 
moting the good of men and the glory of 
God, will be looked upon with keen interest 
when he joins the company of the immortals. 
They must have heard of his fame, they may, 
in their ways, have seen and helped him 
already." 

This we have on authority. " They that be 
teachers shall shine as the brightness of the 
firmament, and they that have turned many to 
righteousness as the stars for ever and ever." 



V. 

FEEDEEICK W. EOBEETSOK 

IN modern days no man of the pulpit has 
excited more interest than the Eev. F. 
W. Eobertson. There is something phenome- 
nal about him. While he lived his brief life, 
his influence was confined to a fashionable 
watering place forty miles from London. 
Since his death he has preached to tens of 
thousands. Wherever the English language 
is spoken, and beyond, Eobertson's Sermons 
have been read and re-read. "Except a corn 
of wheat fall into the ground and die, it 
abideth alone ; but if it die, it bringeth forth 
much fruit." That passage has been quoted 
over and over as expressing the method 
through which Eobertson has gained his 

96 



FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON". 97 

unique influence. Those of you who have 
read his biography and those wonderful letters 
with which it is crowded, know far more about 
him than I can even suggest. I am not about 
to criticise his sermons; that in me would be 
an impertinence. Nor am I about to recall 
the recorded events in his life — a life all too 
brief, yet long enough for the highest order of 
usefulness. It is hardly possible to move 
along a line of remark which has not already 
been traveled by others with more knowledge, 
and therefore with firmer tread than to me is 
possible. But the more I think of Eobertson 
the more unique does he become. 

The eldest of seven children, he was born 
February 3, 1816, in London. His grand- 
father a colonel in the British army, his father 
a captain in the Royal Artillery, Frederick 
Robertson inherited a soldier's temperament, 
and was always complaining that his life had 
been turned out of its natural course. "When 
nearly at the end of his career, he writes : 
"As I walked home in my dragoon cloak, I 
thouglit I ought to be at this moment lying in 



98 FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON. 

it at rest at Moodkee, where the Third fought 
so gallantly, and where spots of brighter 
green than usual are the only record to mark 
where the flesh of heroes is melting into its 
kindred dust again." The many removals 
from place to place of his family while a child 
— the first five years of his life in Fort Leith, 
then at Beverley in Yorkshire, then at Tours, 
then back again to England — such a roving 
existence is generally very unfavorable to a 
pious training of youth ; but Eobertson seems 
to have been very carefully trained, until at 
sixteen he was placed in the New Academy, 
Edinburgh. 

As a boy he had the intensity and sensitive- 
ness which characterized his manhood. Every- 
thing beautiful appealed to him. He was pas- 
sionately fond of nature, passionately fond of 
animals and birds ; in character, chivalrous 
and imaginative ; he had, too, a clear sense 
of duty, and was devout and reverent withal. 
Prayer seems to have been natural to him 
from the earliest dawn of intelligence. To all 
pure souls, most likely, it is natural, but the 



FKEDEKICK W. ROBERTSON. 99 

boy E,obertson felt it was good for all occa- 
sions, and not merely for religious occasions. 
" I remember, when a very young boy," he 
writes, " going out shooting with my father, 
and praying, as often as the dogs came to a 
point, that he might kill the bird. As he did 
not always do this, and as sometimes there 
would occur false points, my heart got be- 
wildered. I believe I began to doubt some 
times the efficacy of prayer, sometimes the 
lawfulness of field sports. Once, too, I recol- 
lect, when I was taken up with nine other 
boys at school to be unjustly punished, I 
prayed to escape the shame. The master, pre- 
viously to flogging all the others, said to me, 
to the great bewilderment of the whole school, 
' Little boy, I excuse you ; I have particular 
reasons for it.' And, in fact, I was never 
flogged during the three years I was at that 
school. That incident settled my mind for a 
long time ; only I doubt whether it did me any 
good, for prayer became a charm. I fancied 
myself the favorite of the Invisible. I knew 
that I carried about a talisman which would 



100 PREDERICK W. ROBERTSON. 

save me from all harm. It did not make me 
better ; it simply gave me security, as the Jew 
felt safe in being the descendant of Abraham, 
or went into battle under the protection of the 
ark, sinning no less all the time." 

For a little time after leaving this school, 
Eobertson was in a lawyer's office ; this he 
utterly detested and abominated ; he longed 
to go into the army. When his father, who 
knew the young man better than he knew him- 
self, suggested to him to go to college and pre- 
pare for the Christian ministry, his reply was 
decided — " Anything but that ; I am not fit 
for it." 

It seemed for a time as if the army was his 
destiny. His name was put down on the list 
for a cavalry regiment serving in India. Be- 
fore his departure he made the acquaintance, 
casually, as it seemed, of a Mr. Davis, and his 
course from that hour seemed to be changed. 
The change came about in a very singular way 
— in fact, it came about from the barking of a 
dog. Lady Trench resided next door to Cap- 
tain Eobertson ; she had a daughter seriously 



FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON. 101 

ill ; the young lady was prevented from sleep- 
ing by the barking of Captain Robertson's 
dog. The families were strangers to each 
other, but Lady Trench wrote to beg that the 
dog might be removed ; the dog was not only 
removed, but in so kind and acquiescent a 
manner that Lady Trench called to express her 
thanks. She was so much struck with the 
bearing of the eldest son that an intimacy 
sprang up between the families which resulted 
in the introduction of young Robertson to 
some of Lady Trench's clerical friends, and 
they insisted that he should look in another 
direction than the army for his life work. 
The result washe soon went to the University 
of Oxford to begin mental preparation. Re- 
ferring afterward to the singular change that 
came in his course of life, he writes. " All is 
free," he says — " that is false ; all is fated — 
that is false. All things are free and fated 
— that is true. I cannot overthrow the argu- 
ment of the man who says that everything is 
fated, or, in other words, that God orders all 
things, and cannot change that order. If I 



102 FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON. 

had not met a certain person, I should not 
have changed my profession ; if I had not 
known a certain lady, I should not probably 
have met this person ; if that lady had not had 
a delicate daughter who was disturbed by the 
barking of my dog, if my dog had not barked 
that night, I should now have been in the 
dragoons, or fertilizing the soil of India. Who 
can say that these things were not ordered, 
and that apparently the merest trifles did not 
produce failure and a marred existence ? " To 
the barking of a dog we probably owe those 
volumes of sermons, which have, perhaps, in- 
fluenced more thoughtful minds than any other 
sermons preached in the nineteenth century. 

Well, Eobertson was at Oxford at the time 
when Newman was in the flood tide of his in- 
fluence. He must have heard Newman again 
and again. What special influence he had over 
such a sensitive and receptive mind we cannot 
tell, but Robertson's mind was too discriminat- 
ing to be swept into any stream and carried 
down with the current. While at Oxford two 
greater men than Newman seemed to have 



FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON. 103 

produced an influence over him for good. A 
brilliant course of lectures on history was 
given by Dr. Arnold (of Eugby). All that 
was most wise and most distinguished thronged 
the University Theater in order to listen to 
him. On another occasion there appeared one 
whose poetry had influenced Eobertson's mind 
more powerfully than the poetry of almost 
any other. We feel the influence of Words- 
worth over E-obertson. It forces itself into 
recognition in his sermons, and especially in 
his letters. We must not linger over these 
formative influences, as it is to Eobertson as a 
preacher rather than as a thinker our attention 
is drawn. He left Oxford, received ordina- 
tion, began his ministry, flrst in Winchester, 
then in Cheltenham — in both positions as an 
assistant — then for a very brief period at 
Oxford, and finally at Brighton, with which 
town his name is forever associated. He began 
his ministry as one attached to the evaugelical 
party in the church. He ended it at Brighton, 
at the early age of thirty-seven years, virtually 
cast out by all parties. 



104 FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON. 

When I think of Ms departuije hence at that 
age, and of the influence he has exerted — • 
when also it is taken into account that that 
influence belongs mainly to the last seven 
years of his life — it is almost incredible that 
any human being could crowd so much think- 
ing into so brief a space of time. I believe 
that no one can do it and live. Eobertson 
himself seems to me an illustration of the fact. 
He was a man of naturally robust constitution, 
but the fires within were so hot that they 
burnt up the house in which they were lit. 
He was so sensitive to all influences in nature 
and in social life that his joy, when he had it, 
was too great for mortal man, and his suffer- 
ing when it came was too intense to be sup- 
portable. Undoubtedly he was a martyr to 
his own nobilitv. His verv e^reatness and 
goodness made him capable of a degree of 
mental suffering in presence of evil of which 
ordinary men have not the faintest conception. 
Any man who is blessed (or cursed — which- 
ever word we may employ) with an ideal so 
lofty as that of Robertson's must of necessity 



FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON. 105 

have a sad life and a sad ministry, as Caesar 
Malan predicted of Robertson. Any man who 
is intensely individual, who thinks more deeply 
and with more thoroughness than his fellow- 
men, must expect to find misunderstanding 
and suspicion dogging his steps. Just as that 
portion of the female world which calls itself 
" society " never forgives a woman for dressing 
out of the fashion, so that portion of the re- 
ligious world which represents the Pharisees 
of the olden time never forgives a man for 
thinking ahead of the fashion of his day. The 
church to which Eobertson belonged had in it 
then, and has now, three parties, or schools — 
High, Low, and Broad. In Robertson's young 
manhood Arnold stood for the Broad Church, 
Newman for the High Church, men like Close 
of Cheltenham, Stowell of Manchester, and 
McNeile of Liverpool, for the Low Church. 
The Evangelical school was then in the ascend- 
ency in the Episcopal Church of England. It 
is so no longer. The reason of it is that it 
became too sectarian, too mechanical in its in- 
terpretation of Scripture, and too inconsistent 



106 FKEDERICK W. ROBERTSON. 

with itself, to maintain its influence. It ceased 
to grow, and when anything ceases to grow it 
ceases to live. 

Great men like Robertson have to do their 
own thinking, and the men who help them 
to think are sure to become their friends. 
Wordsworth had helped Kobertson to see God 
in nature, Arnold had helped him to see God in 
history, and his own continuous study of the 
Bible and of the best literature of his own 
day had helped him to see God in humanity. 
And so all things in nature, and all men of 
eminence in letters, seemed to come to his 
open, truthful, discriminating nature with some 
tribute, and he grew out of all parties. " God 
and the human soul'' he came to know — noth- 
ing else. How could the High Churchmen 
feel kindly toward a man who wrote : " I can 
not say how much it has impressed me with 
the feeling that these apparently innocent 
things — Apostolic Succession and High Views 
(as they are called) of the Christian Sacraments 
— are really anti-Christian in their operation. 
When they take shape in actual life, they 



FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON. 107 

reveal their meaning to be a doctrine of elec- 
tion, which is just so ninch worse than the 
common one that it is external and official, and 
which, moreover, renders the sacraments them- 
selves uncertain in their efficacy by demanding 
the co-operation of the will of the minister if 
the reception of them is to be savingly bene- 
ficial. How destructive the doctrine must be 
of all simple and immediate fellowship be- 
tween man and man and between man and 
God I need not say." 

How could the men who thought that to 
save " Standards of Doctrine " was everything 
be on the most amiable terms with a man who 
could write : " There is no substitute for the 
light within us revealing the light of God. 
Standards of doctrine do often more harm than 
good ; and by their very definitions and exter- 
nalities lead the mind away from God instead 
of to him." Yet we must not suppose that 
the word " liberal," as we use it here in New 
England, was applicable to Robertson. That 
which he saw to be truth he held with a 
tenaciousness, and bowed down to it with 



108 EREDERICK W. ROBERTSON. 

a reverence whicli indicated that his heart was 
wholly and entirely in it. No worship could 
be more passionate, more profound, than his 
worship of God's Christ. But he saw that 
man's conception of truth can never measure 
the truth as it is in the mind of God; that as 
the mind of a man becomes purer and freer, so 
his conception of the truth as it is in Jesus 
must become larger and grander. " God's 
truth," he says, " must be boundless. Tracta- 
rians and Evangelicals suppose that it is a 
pond which you can walk round and say, ^I 
hold the truth.' What ! all ? Yes, all ! There 
it is, circumscribed, defined, proved, quite large 
enough to be the immeasurable Gospel of the 
Lord of the Universe ! " What about creeds ? 
we ask him. They are useful, he replies, as 
aids to faith, but intolerable as limitations of 
faith. It is customary to say that Eobertson 
lived before his time ; that if he had lived in 
our generation he would have received better 
treatment from the ecclesiastics of our day 
than he received from the ecclesiastics of that 
English State Church to which he belonged 



FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON. 109, 

only in name. I am not so sure of that. Kob- 
ertson died in 1853. He is one of the most 
modern of thinkers in the Church of our 
day. 

It is true that an immense change has come 
over the religious life of England since the death 
of this great thinker. It would be very difficult 
to get up any persecution in England now 
against any clergyman who showed himself as 
true to the Christ of God and to the Scripture 
as did E-obertson. And this recognition of a 
man's right to go to the Scriptures for himself 
and receive the instruction of apostles and 
prophets at first hand is largely attributable to 
the seed sown by this eminent man of whom 
we are thinking. Now, we must always try to 
cherish a charitable spirit even toward those 
who persecute others. I know how exceed- 
ingly difficult it is to credit the persecutor 
with anything good. To a man whose spirit 
has been bathed again and again in the bath of 
regeneration which Scripture truth affords, the 
conduct of the Vicar of Brighton toward a man 
like Robertson does seem atrocious. To us 



110 FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON. 

standing afar off and looking at both it rouses 
within us hot indignation to find a hard ofiicial 
like him of Brighton hindering the over- 
wrought Robertson from obtaining the assist- 
ant whose help might have saved Robertson 
for a few more years of useful life. But it is 
in the nature of things that such a man as that 
Vicar of Brighton could not understand or 
sympathize with a man of such a high order of 
genius as the minister of Trinity Chapel. 
While in a very real sense Robertson's inten- 
sity and zeal killed him, yet is it also true that 
in his last days he was sacrificed to the want 
of sympathy which arose out of the low order 
of intellect and corresponding narrow affec- 
tional nature of those around him. The Vicar 
of Brighton was his ecclesiastical superior, 
and to have in his neighborhood such a man 
as this, whose sympathies were with the poor- 
est as ardently as with others in society, to 
whom workingmen looked with a reverence 
that was new to them, for whom servant girls 
had an affection as if he were their elder 
brother, to whom soldiers went as recognizing 



FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON. Ill 

in him the true type of the Eed Cross knight, 
to hear whom lawyers took a journey on Satur- 
day from London and remained till Monday at 
Brighton, that High Church machinist — eccle- 
siastic I mean — could not understand it ; how 
could he ? John the Baptist in the neighbor- 
hood of Herod was not a more unwelcome 
voice. 

There is always something blind and cruel 
about the religious persecutor. He is blind, 
for he persuades himself that he is doing God 
service, when he is really serving Antichrist. 
He is blind, for he seldom understands, or puts 
himself to the trouble to understand, the man 
whom he persecutes. He assumes that he (the 
persecutor) is right, and cannot but be right. 
There is very little room for doubt that when 
the Pharisees and Sadducees crucified Jesus of 
Nazareth they persuaded themselves that it 
was done to preserve the nation and the true 
religion. Many, if not most of these men 
were sincere, but they were wrong all the 
same. The crudest men in the world are the 
men who are sincere and wrong at the same 



112 FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON. 

time. The men who put Jesus to death were 
the destroyers of their nation ; he would have 
been its saviour. Zeal without knowledge is 
the fire that burns the house down, not the fire 
that warms the atmosphere into a summer 
temperature. Not zeal alone, or sincerity 
alone, but a total submission to the mind and 
will of Christ, heart-sympathy with him and 
his redeeming work for man, a sympathy 
which will not allow us to be hard or cruel — 
that is the Christian spirit. We often talk of 
zeal for truth, and try to justify conduct that 
does not look Christian in spirit and temper 
by this plea, that the truth must be maintained 
at all hazards. But what is truth ? "I am 
the truth," says Jesus the Christ. We may 
take his words of love and make paving-stones 
of them to throw at heretics. We may be as 
zealous as the disciples who wanted to call 
down fire from heaven on those who were not 
of their way of thinking ; but Jesus rebuked 
them, and said, " Ye know not what spirit ye 
are of." In the light of Scripture there was 
no justification for the cruel and heartless con- 



FREDERICK W. ROBERTSOX. 113 

duct of that Vicar of Brigliton who let poor 
Robertson die rather than allow him to have 
the man he wanted as a helper in the work at 
Trinity Chapel. The greatest thinker, one 
only excepted, who has appeared in the Eng- 
lish pulpit in our century was sacrificed to 
heartless officialism. " If the highest work of 
thought," says one, " is to illuminate a subject, 
to pierce to its heart and unfold in creative 
order all its parts, and not merely to tell you 
about it and what others have thought about 
it — to make alive a new order of ideas, and 
not merely to explain an old order — then 
Frederick Robertson takes rank as among 
the great thinkers of modern times." " He 
not only went into a subject and around it, 
but he pictured it. He made it alive ; he 
pierced it through and through with light 
and life." 

Of course the attitudinarians and the platitu- 
dinarians called this man dangerous, even social- 
istic. He believed that workingmen had as 
real a property in Christianity as had other 
men — that it specially belonged to them ; and 



114 FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON. 

souglit to bring Christianity into the work- 
shop, and into the common business of life. 
That was called Socialism. Some of you may 
remember that passage which occurs in an 
address given to workingmen about infidel 
publications in the Town Hall of Brighton. 
It evidenced that Christ was to him the over- 
powering manifestation of the Divine Presence 
— that the most innate, most sacred love in his 
nature was his love to God's Christ : 

" I refuse to permit discussion respecting 
the love which a Christian man bears his Ke- 
deemer — a love more delicate far than the 
love which was ever borne to sister or the ado- 
ration with which he regards his God — a 
reverence more sacred than ever man bore to 
mother." 

Christ and the soul — these were his con- 
stant study. To attempt to show in what 
respects his treatment of the doctrines of the 
Christian religion was peculiar would occupy 
too much space for our present limitations. 

As to his personal character, there was in it 
a dignity which seemed so natural to him that 



FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON. 115 

it offended none, a chivalry whicli made him 
daring and noble, a purity which seemed stain- 
less. He was undoubtedly fastidious, and in 
him there was that morbid streak which one 
finds so generally in the most sensitive and 
greatest minds. Nothing could offend him more 
than to call him "a popular preacher." He 
knew by what base arts popularity was often 
won, and he despised it. The terrible reaction 
that came after such intense preaching made 
him almost despise popular address. The 
vanity and fastidiousness of a fashionable 
watering-place rasped him all the time. Take 
such an extract as this : " I wish I did not 
hate preaching so much ; the degradation of 
being a Brighton preacher is almost intoler- 
able. 'I cannot dig — to beg I am ashamed,' 
but I think there is not a hard-working artisan 
who does not seem to me a worthier and a 
higher being than myself. How humiliated 
and degraded to the dust I have felt in per- 
ceiving myself quietly taken for the popular 
preacher of a fashionable watering-place ; how 
slight the power seems to me to be given by it 



116 FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON. 

of winning souls ; and how sternly I have kept 
my tongue from saying a syllable or a sentence 
in pulpit or on platform because it would be 
popular ! '' 

This is morbid, possibly, and yet I have an 
idea that many other preachers than Robertson 
know something of a similar state of mind in 
those times of reaction which follow the most 
intense efforts of speech. 

Whatever his critics may have had to say 
of an adverse and captious quality about 
Robertson, who does not feel in heart-sym- 
pathy with him when we find such a passage 
as this : 

"When we gaze on the perfect righteousness 
of Christ, and are able to say, There, that is 
my religion, that is what I want to be, that is 
what I am not, that is my offering, that is my 
life as I would wish to give it — my Saviour, 
fill up the blurred and blotted sketch which 
my clumsy hand has drawn of a divine life 
with the fullness of thy perfect picture! — T 
feel the beauty which I cannot realize. Robe 
me in thine unutterable purity. 



FREDERICK W. ROBERTSOX. 117 

" ' Rock of ages, cleft for me, 
Let me hide myself in thee.' " 

These brief and most fragmentary remarks 
are not to be taken as anything more than 
mere notes on Eobertson and his influence. 
Thinking men and thinking women will relish 
Kobertson, but spiritual consumptives and 
Pharisees and Sadducees hardly at all. Yet 
he remains a mighty power for generations yet 
unborn. His sermons will be read and re-read 
as long as Christian disciples are found. " As 
I read his life," says one, " it seems to me we 
are reading a story of Christian knighthood." 

Before the valley of the shadow of death 
was entered, he seemed to know that he must 
die young, and so crowded into his life all the 
work he could do. And when he entered the 
valley the presence of God sustained him. 
When scarcely able to move, a day or two be- 
fore he died, he rose at four o'clock in the 
morning and crept to the window to see as he 
said, the " beautiful morning." The beauty of 
the light and of the sun, and of the trees and 
works of God in nature, always calmed him. 



118 FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON. 

A night or two before his death he dreamed 
that his two sisters, long since dead, came to 
crown him. " I saw them," he said earnestly. 
All reverent kindnesses were heaped around 
his dying bed. '-How diiierent," he said, 
'' the lot of Hiin who would fain have slaked 
his morning hunger with green figs." His 
dear and attached friend, Lady Byron, left a 
sick-bed to see. him, but was permitted to be 
with him oidy a few moments. He suffered 
most acutely ; the brain could hardly endure 
it ; yet he never lost consciousness. When 
they would change his position he could not 
endure the touch, and said : " I cannot bear it; 
let me rest. I must die ; let God do his work." 
These were his last words ; immediately 
afterward all was over. Fatal thirty-seven ! 
the age of Byron, the age of Burns, the age of 
Raphael, and of many others whose sun never 
knew what it was to pass the noonday hour of 
this earthly life. For one day Brighton knew 
no sect and no party. Orthodox and hetero- 
dox, men of all religions and ecclesiastical 
schools, knew each other around Frederick 



FREDERICK W. ROBERTSOX. 119 

Robertson's grave only as men — sinning men, 
redeemed men. Jews, Unitarians, Eoman 
Catholics, Quakers, all followed to the tomb 
this rarest and noblest of men. Lady Byron 
followed on foot. She Avonld not go in her 
carriage, she said, after the remains of snch a 
man. That silent voice was only then begin- 
ning to speak. It was as if God himself should 
say to that cruel ecclesiastic who had helped 
to kill him : " ^ow, for the first time, he en- 
ters his pulpit, and soon thronging thousands 
shall listen to his voice ; wherever Christ is 
worshiped truly, there shall the voice of my 
servant speak." To how many men has he 
been a fountain of inspiration ! How many of 
us ministers have heard his words as if God 
spake to us through him : " This is the minis- 
try and its work — not to drill hearts and 
minds and consciences into right forms of 
thought and mental postures, but to guide to 
the living God who speaks." "■ My brethren, 
if any man or any body of men stand between 
us and the living God, saying, ' Only through 
us, the church, can you approach God ; only 



120 FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON. 

through my consecrated touch can you receive 
grace ; only through my ordained teaching can 
you hear God's voice ; and the voice which 
speaks in your soul, in the still moments of 
existence, is no revelation from God, but a de- 
lusion and a fanaticism' — that man is a false 
priest. To bring the soul face to face with 
God and supersede ourselves, that is the work 
of the Christian ministry." Principal Tulloch 
says : " Eobertson has taught us ' that men 
will advance in religion as in everything else, 
not by displacement, but by expansion, by 
building the temple of truth to a loftier height. 
Few minds have enriched Christian thought 
more in our time, or given it a more healthy 
or sounder impulse." 



VI. 

EMAXUEL SWEDENBOKG. 

THIS is one of the modern leaders of 
thought in whom there is no little of in- 
terest, and about whom we ought to know 
something. He is of several generations prior 
to any of those of whom we have spoken, but 
his influence as a theological teacher belongs 
specially to the last sixty or seventy years. 
To me, as to so many others, he is an enigma. 
His claims for himself as a revealer of the 
spiritual world are immense. Those claims 
have been allowed by a select number of peo- 
ple who have taken him as their religious 
teacher and guide, and have given to him an 
allegiance greater than that which we Biblical- 
ists give to the Apostles — greater even than 

121 



122 EMANUEL SWEDENBORG. 

the ordinary Christian gives to his Christ. 
Those who would know the utmost that can be 
said for the claims of Swedenborg to the alle- 
giance which many minds give him should 
read an English book called " Noble's Appeal '^ 

— a bookj I must own, which, when I read it 
twenty years ago, fascinated me not a little. 

It is not in my purpose or plan in these brief 
expositions of the leaders of thought in the 
modern church to defend or accuse any who 
give in their adhesion to them or dissent from 
them. Believing that Christian congregations 
ought to get all the instruction they will take, 
and that it is much better to have intelligent 
than unintelligent Christian people, my aim is 
simply to give information, and in an uncon- 
troversial way to express opinions whenever it 
seems necessary. In days gone by I have read 
enough of Swedenborg's writings to enable me 
to say that I am acquainted with most of his 
leading positions. It would not be honest or 
fair for me to speak about him if I had only 
such knowledge as people pick up from others 

— such knowledge as floats into the mind on 



EMANUEL SWEDENBORG. 123 

the rippling current of conversation. Knowl- 
edge gained in that fashion is as fragmentary 
and unreliable as knowledge can well be. 
Even an honest and intelligent man's report of 
another man's views and opinions is not often 
to be trusted. The eminent ability that we 
have of misunderstanding one another is to me 
more and more remarkable. It is scarcely 
ever safe or just to receive at second-hand the 
opinions and teachings of any man of active 
and independent research. Every mind seems 
to possess its own coloring and refracting 
medium. Without in the slightest degree in- 
tending to be dishonest, men are dishonest. 
Sweet reasonableness is as rare as soured prej- 
udice is common. The poet has said that "an 
honest man's the noblest work of God," but 
that noblest work is seldom met with. I be- 
lieve that it is easier for a miser to give one 
hundred thousand dollars to charities than it 
is for the most of men to be honest and fair 
and just to all they meet. And so, if I want 
to know what a great man teaches, I feel in 
duty bound to go to his own bookS; not to 



124 EMANUEL SWEDENBORG. 

those of his commentators, be they friends or 
enemies. On this principle I have read no 
little of what would be called heresy in my 
time, with the result to myself of making me 
perceive that God has not put the whole of his 
truth into any one man — except into the One 
who came to be the Archetype of Humanity as 
it is in the mind of God ; with the result of 
helping me to perceive how immensely superior 
the New Testament is to anything and every- 
thing else in literature. If in my earliest 
days I had not been taught that everything 
is to be tested by the mind and spirit and 
teaching and person of Jesus the Christ, I 
should have suffered great damage and harm 
from this unrestrained mental traveling. I am 
convinced that it is not good for young people 
to be allowed to wander here, there, and every- 
where. Until the years of discretion have 
arrived, it seems to me to have been designed 
by God that fathers and mothers should exer- 
cise control over the moral, mental, and phys- 
ical life of their children. The quality and 
direction of a young person's life will, far 



EMANUEL SWEDENBORG. 125 

more than we seem to recognize, depend on 
the books they read and the coinpauy they 
keep. Liberty belongs to those who are of 
full growth, not to infants. Training and dis- 
cipline belong to these. But I must not dwell 
within the area of these general remarks. A 
few facts as to the life of Emanuel Swedenborg 
before he reached the age of fifty-four, when 
the change came to him, or the stage in de- 
velopment when he claims that the spiritual 
world was opened to him. 

He was born in Stockholm in 1688, and died 
in London in 1772. He lived eighty-four years 
on this planet. Thirty years of that eighty- 
four were consecrated to the study of theology 
and matters suggested or " revealed " (as he 
would say) to him about the spiritual world. 
Up to fifty-five years of age he was one of the 
most remarkable of scientific men. He was an 
assessor of mines ; a military engineer ; a great 
traveler — visiting England, Holland, France, 
and Germany when traveling was much more 
laborious work than it is now. His mind 
seems to have been intensely active; his in- 



126 EMANUEL SWEDENBORG. 

ventiveness great beyond almost any man of 
his age ; he wrote on such subjects as decimal 
money, on finding the longitude at sea by the 
moon, on docks, sluices, and salt works, and on 
very many other mathematical, scientific, and 
practical themes. 

To enumerate his scientific works is to cata- 
logue a library. In some of them he antici- 
pated recent discoveries. These are some of 
his titles : " Principia ; or. The First Principles 
of oSTatural Things ; being New Attempts to- 
ward a Philosophical Explanation of the Ele- 
mentary World ; " " The Infinite and the Final 
Cause of Creation, and the Intercourse between 
the Soul and the Body ; " "■ The Animal King- 
dom," one of his most delightful books. His 
studies on the relation of matter to mind seem 
to have been transitional to that subtler and 
intenser theme which engrossed his attention 
for the last thirty years of his life. In 1756 
he published in London, in eight quarto Latin 
volumes, his " Arcana Cselestia," a revelation 
of the inner sense of Genesis and Exodus. 
From this time onward he appears before the 



EMANUEL SWEDEXBORG. 127 

world as a seer, as one whose interior sight is 
opened to the order and the personalities of 
the spiritual world. The many volumes of his 
which are occupied with these themes, regard 
them as we will — as visions similar to those 
of Dante, or as visions dissimilar from those 
of any other man — are to the last degree mys- 
terious and wonderful. I do not undertake to 
interpret or account for Swedenborg. No such 
man has appeared in the history of these later 
times. He is unique. To me he is a problem 
I cannot solve — a profundity I cannot fathom. 
The number of tender and devout minds who 
have been fascinated by him is very many. 
Of course those who have given themselves up 
to him, as a friend of mine in the past did, to 
be led and guided by him to the exclusion of 
all other teachers, have no difficulty. They 
accept him as a seer; as the greatest of all 
great interpreters of life and its problems ; as 
infallible; as settling everything for them — 
from him there is no appeal. Many others 
who have made themselves familiar with his 
works — the many, I might say — cannot take 



128 EMANUEL SWEDENBORG. 

that position. They admit his goodness as a 
man, his greatness of mind, the marvelousness 
of his nature. They admit him to be one of 
the greatest of great psychologists. And if 
in this chorus of voices my own whisper could 
be heard, I should be inclined to say that 
it is this wondrous psychological ability that 
distinguishes Swedenborg above all modern 
men — his ability of taking the interior ideas 
of things, and of so living in and with what we 
may call the spiritual essences of things that 
they become to him objective realities. I know 
how coldly such a suggestion as this would be 
received by devout men who have taken 
Swedenborg as their seer. When, however, 
one reads Dante, one feels as if everything 
were as real as when one reads Swedenborg. 
The men and women remain in the mind as 
individual, as vivid, as lifelike, as do Sweden- 
borg's. It would seem as if Dante all but be- 
lieved in the Irteralness of his descriptions of 
places and people. But, says one, he wrote 
poetry, and Swedenborg did not. The peculi- 
arity about Swedenborg is his entire lack of the 



EMANUEL SWEDENBORG. 129 

strictly poetical. Emerson, remarking upon this 
lack, says : " His books have no melody, no 
emotion, no humor, no relief to the dead, prosaic 
level. The entire want of poetry in so tran- 
scendent a mind . . is a kind of warning.'' 
This is all the more remarkable as Swedenborg 
restored to the thought of the world the lost 
science of correspondencies. This science may 
be suggested in a few words to those who have 
no correct idea of what is meant by it. The 
idea is that the natural world is the outbirth 
of the spiritual world. Unseen evil is mani- 
fested in things hurtful and ugly; unseen good 
in things useful and beautiful. Man is a sum- 
mary of nature; nature is man in diffusion; 
all things, therefore, in nature, in fire, air, 
earth, and water — every beast, bird, fish, in- 
sect, and reptile — every tree, herb, fruit, and 
flower, represent and correspond to things in 
the mind of man and in the spiritual world. 
The Scriptures are written according to this 
science of correspondence, and by aid of the 
science their mysteries are unlocked. There 
are, according to Swedenborg, three heavens. 



130 EMANUEL SWEDENBORG. 

consisting of three orders of angels ; the first 
distinguished for love, the second for wisdom, 
and the last for obedience. All angels have 
lived on earth; none were created such. They 
are men and women in every respect. They 
marry, and live in societies, in cities and coun- 
tries, just as in this world, but in happiness 
and glory ineffable. All in whom love is the 
ruling motive are in the heavens ; all in whom 
self-love is the ruling motive are in hell — or 
in one of three hells. If one spirit desires to 
see another, the desire immediately brings 
them together ; there is no necessity to take a 
long journey. Love attracts, hate repels and 
separates. There is no obligation, as here, to 
remain in any uncongenial society. There are 
no artificial bonds. All is real, and according 
to the interior fact. Thus the science of cor- 
respondencies runs through everything — all 
orders, all societies. I confess to you that 
about very much of this there is strong proba- 
bility, and a kind of fascination. I have found 
in reading Swedenborg's books that for a time 
they have a charm, and one is carried along 



EMANUEL SWEDENBORG. 131 

from wonder to wonder, wishing it were all 
true; but by and by it becomes mechanical. 
It seems too ingenious. The very order be- 
comes wearisome. It is like going into one of 
those gardens in France where everything is 
so neat and precise — trees all clipped to repre- 
sent beasts, birds, and fishes, castles and 
houses : at first the newness charms, but after 
a while you long to plunge into the forest to 
escape it. In the forest there is just as much 
order and law as in that garden, but it does not 
obtrude itself upon you as the first thing. It 
is hidden. The regnant idea is life, variety, 
beauty, freedom. And yefc in that forest not a 
single law of creation is set at defiance. Every- 
thing moves as it was ordained to move. 

ISTo one can be more severely critical than 
Emerson when he chooses, as he has an eye 
keen enough to see where the defects come in. 
While he does not to me suggest any explan- 
ation of this wonderful vision-power of Sweden- 
borg, yet he sees where the defects are, as 
when he says : " These angels that Swedenborg 
paints give us no very high idea of their dis- 



132 EMANUEL SWEDENBORG. 

cipline and culture. They are all country par- 
sons. Their heaven is a fete champetre, an 
evangelical picnic of French distribution of 
prizes to virtuous peasants. Strange, scholas- 
tic, didactic, passionless, bloodless man, who 
denotes classes of souls as a botanist disposes 
of a carex, and visits doleful hells as a stratum 
of chalk or hornblende ! He has no sym- 
pathy. He goes up and down the world of 
men, a modern Rhadamanthus in gold-headed 
cane and peruke, and, with nonchalance and 
the air of a referee, distributes souls. Sweden- 
borg is disagreeably wise, and, with all his 
accumulated gifts, paralyzes and repels." To 
an extent that criticism is just, and yet it does 
nothing further than create skepticism as to 
the claims of this seer of Stockholm. It does 
not account for him, or throw any light into 
the deep mystery of this man's nature. Nega- 
tive criticism is easy, but to offer an exegesis 
of a great life crowded with remarkable facts 
and events, so as to bring it into unity with 
itself, is not so easy. We have to recognize 
that it is not impossible that God might pre- 



EMANUEL SWEDENBORG. 133 

pare some man to whose mind lie should reveal 
something more about the life of man after 
death has divested him of his material body. 
This is not at all unlikely. It is not altogether 
impossible that Swedenborg may have been 
that man. I do not say that he is. If siich 
revelations were made, it is not impossible 
that the revelations, and his own thoughts and 
inferences from them, may have been so mixed 
up and confused as that he should take the 
one for the other ; so that in these visions of 
Swedenborg there may be fact and fiction in- 
extricably combined. This is certain, that 
many intelligent and devout people have de- 
rived great comfort from Swedenborg's revela- 
tions (as they hold them) of the spiritual 
world. But that fact must not be made too 
much of, speaking generally. Swedenborg's 
doctrine of the spiritual body and of the spir- 
itual world seems, in most particulars, so in 
accord with St. Paul's setting forth of the 
truths of immortality in that wonderful resur- 
rection chapter in the First Epistle to the Cor- 
inthian Christians, that the consolation may 



134 EMANUEL SWEDENBOKG. 

come from the truth that is in it, and not from 
anything that Swedenborg has added to it or 
developed from it. For myself, I cannot see 
what should hinder any of us from deriving 
the same amount of comfort from that which 
has been spoken by our Lord and his Apostles. 
The comfort which the Christian mourner gets 
respecting the loved and gone cannot be de- 
rived from the scenery of the surroundings in 
which they are, nor from the companionships 
in the midst of which they are ; but from these 
simple facts, that they are as much in God's 
care and keeping as ever they were — are freed 
from the pains and sorrows which belong to 
this condition of life, and are happy in the 
love and life God gives them. Add what else 
you like, these are the true sources of comfort. 
But, says a Swedenborgian to me, the spiritual 
world is more real to me when I accept these 
revelations of the seer. I have often wondered 
what is meant by that word " real," as so used. 
Does it mean simply more materialized, or 
what ? 

If we derive our comfort from anything 



EMANUEL SWEDENBORG. 135 

short of faith in the divine character as being 
in itself pure and perfect goodness and father- 
liness, are we not relying on something exter- 
nal to God himself ? Have you not noticed 
the striking difference between the Lord and 
his Apostles and all other teachers in this 
respect, that they make all happiness to depend 
on inward states of heart, and not on exter- 
nal surroundings ? Put the man of perfectly 
regenerated soul where you will, the desert 
rejoices and blossoms as the rose at his coming. 
In this respect our Lord and his Apostles stand 
away and above all other teachers, in that they 
do not bribe men into goodness by the detailed 
picturings of aiiy external heaven, and even 
when they speak of the loss which in eternity 
men out of harmony with God suffer, the re- 
tributive word is a word short, sharp, generic. 
There is no dwelling on hideous details. Not 
place, but condition ; not surroundings, but 
states of heart and mind — these with them 
are everything. Not what God can give, but 
what he is in himself — these are the thoughts 
which occupy them. In this respect they reach 



136 EMANUEL SWEDENBORG. 

the ideal of whicli the highest teachers have 
spoken. 

It would take up more of our space than 
is allowable if I should attempt even the 
most inadequate setting forth of the interpre- 
tations of Swedenborg. For he regards him- 
self as an interpreter of Scripture, a seer into 
the mysteries of God. His interpretations of 
Scripture are not always such as seem to bring 
Scripture into harmony with itself. One is 
startled to find that, notwithstanding his de- 
voutness, and his deep repentance after sin, 
and his faith in God, King David is in hell ; 
and much more taken aback to find Paul the 
Apostle there too, and that because he taught 
the doctrine of justification by faith, toward 
w^hich Swedenborg has much antipathy. When 
we find these among the facts, it makes us 
doubt the factuality of the facts. Moreover, 
one cannot but doubt the correctness of the 
testimony of Swedenborg when he tells us that 
the Last Judgment took place in the spiritual 
world in the year 1757. He tells us also that 
the Dutch in the other world live in a heaven 



EMANUEL SWEDENBORG. 137 

by 'themselves, and the English in a heaven by 
themselves. Not a few curiosities of this kind 
are to be found in his writings. 

And yet, though we may seriously doubt the 
objectivity of his visions, or, if he had real 
visions, doubt his accuracy in reporting them ; 
though we may doubt also his correctness in 
expounding the nature of Jesus the Christ — 
making, if I understand him aright, a kind of 
tabernacle in which God dwelt, affirming the 
divinity, but denying the perfect humanity — 
yet there is so much that commends itself as 
psychologic truth all up and down the writings 
of Swedenborg that it is impossible not to re- 
gard him as something more than a visionary 
— a great teacher to the world at large, as 
well as a great mystery. For a very long time 
to come, perhaps always, he will be a study to 
men of succeeding generations. Men will try 
to account for these visions of his on which 
his fame rests. Psychologists and philoso- 
phers tell us that underneath man's ordinary 
consciousness is what has been called a sub- 
consciousness, and that it is possible for men 



138 EMANUEL SWEDENBORG. 

to sit apart from this sub-consciousness, 
and mistake the visions which arise iu 
it for objective realities. In this way they 
try to account for the visions of Sweden- 
borg. I do not undertake to affirm that such 
a method is adequate or satisfactory. The 
capabilities of human nature have never yet 
been measured, nor can they be in this limited 
condition where the material reveals and yet 
obstructs our perceptions. It is always best 
to hold ourselves in an attitude not too stiff 
and unelastic, and yet not too pliant or uncon- 
servative. God has put bones into our nature 
as well as given us flesh. The flesh yields 
while the bones remain firm. And so in every 
man there ought to be an ability of conserva- 
tism balanced by an ability of receiving im- 
pressions from everything good around us. 
We are admonished to " prove all things, and 
to hold fast that which is good." In Sweden- 
borg there is a great deal that is undeniably 
good and great ; there is very much which re- 
mains doubtful, problematical ; to very many 
men, men too who are neither ignorant nor 



EMANUEL SWEDENBORG. 139 

stupid, altogether unintelligible and unac- 
countable. So far as lie is a commentator on the 
Christian Scriptures I should be disposed to con- 
sult him carefully ; so far as he undertakes 
to go beyond the teachings of Christ and his 
Apostles I listen patiently, but in a condition 
of noncommittal ; so far as he contradicts 
that teaching which to me is authoritative, 
because in its quality superior to anything 
else I can find, and in its evidence irresistible 
— so far I must regard him as wrong and un- 
trustworthy. I cannot refuse, however, to 
recognize that, as Emerson says, " He elected 
goodness as the clue to which the soul must 
cling in all this labyrinth of nature. Nothing 
can keep you, not fate, nor health, nor admir- 
able intellect — none can keep you but recti- 
tude only, rectitude for ever and ever." 

I cannot forget that he set Christ before 
men as the sole and only revelation of the 
nature of God. I cannot ignore the fact that 
his doctrine of the omnipresence of God's 
Spirit is beautiful and complete. " All things 
(he says), and each of them to the very utter- 



140 EMANUEL SWEDENBORG. 

most, exist and subsist instantly from God. If 
the connection of anything with him were 
broken for a moment, it would instantly vanish ; 
for existence is perpetual subsistence, and 
preservation perpetual creation." 

Swedenborg made no attempt to establish a 
sect. He regarded the truth that had been 
given to him as universal and for all who 
could receive it. A sect has grown into form 
which accepts his writings as nothing less than 
revelations from heaven. Many of the men 
who esteem him the most highly are not in 
harmony with any movement which aims to 
sectarianize his name and fame. The "New 
Church signified by the New Jerusalem in the 
Kevelation " was organized in 1788 by Eobert 
Hindmarsh, a printer in Clerkenwell, London, 
who was elected by lot to baptize and ordain 
his comrades in the ministry. There are some 
sixty small societies in Great Britain. But 
the disciples of the Swedish seer are more 
numerous in the United States than elsewhere. 

It seems strange to us that so few people in 
any church or sect seem willing to allow the 



EMANUEL SWEDENBORG. 141 

all-sufficiency of Scripture truth as adequate to 
the enlightenment of the mind of man in re- 
gard to the faith and duty which God requires 
of us in this brief life. Something must be 
added. If you inquire diligently into the con- 
troversies of the Church, you will find almost 
invariably that it is the something added 
which is the bone of contention. Of course, if 
I could believe that Swedenborg was the last 
and greatest of the seers I should have to be his 
humble disciple. To me that conviction is im- 
possible. One wonders, however, if the time 
will ever come when men will be able to trust 
solely and alone in the teaching of Jesus Christ 
and his Apostles, and in the gift of the Holy 
Spirit as the great interpreter. In the midst 
of all the varied ecclesiasticisms of our day we 
must not allow ourselves to forget that for 
that first three hundred years in which wonders 
were wrought men had only the manuscript 
records of the life of Christ and the apostolical 
Epistles. They had no formularies outside of 
these of which we have any trace. Not till 
some time during the fifth century did the 



142 EMANUEL SWEDENBORG. 

Apostles' Creed — that model of simplicity — 
take its final form. The other simple creed 
called the Nicene was not in form till near the 
beginning of the fourth century. For three 
hundred years or more there were no authori- 
tative documents added to the Gospels and 
Epistles. With these. Christian teachers and 
preachers did their great work in the face of a 
hostile paganism and a degraded heathenism. 
All other additions everywhere have grown up 
since then. One wonders why that which was 
all-sufficient in the martyr-days of Christen- 
dom is not sufficient now. Every man has the 
liberty to depart from the simplicities of Script- 
ure — to add to those early Christian docu- 
ments or take from them — but one may be 
pardoned for holding the belief that the more 
faithfully we adhere to the old apostolic con- 
ditions the nearer we are to the mind of Christ 
and the heart of God. 



YII. 
HORACE BUSHNELL. 

WHEN, in the summer of the year 1874, 
a three months' vacation was granted 
me that I might visit the United States, I 
wrote to my friend the Eev. G. W. Field, of 
Bangor, that there were two things essential, 
and all other things optional and to be deter- 
mined by possibility and convenience. The 
two essential things were that I should see 
Niagara and Dr. Bushnell. Such a request 
may seem peculiar and need some explanation. 
To me Niagara was the greatest natural fact 
in all America, and to me Dr. Bushnell, of 
Hartford, was the man who of all men in 
America had done my mind most service. On 
my arrival I found that my friend had so ar- 

143 



144 HORACE BUSHNELL. 

ranged it that we were to go direct to Niagara 
and spend a week there ; then I was to preach 
in the pulpit of the South Church in Hartford 
for two Sabbaths, in order that I might have a 
full and fair opportunity of seeing and talking 
with Bushnell. During that week I was very 
lonesome and homesick, and the ability of see- 
ing Bushnell some part of every day was the 
only adequate compensation I had. Alone in 
a hotel, all faces strange, in a strange land, 
did not suit my temperament at all. How- 
ever, when I got through with my visit I left 
Hartford with something of regret, never ex- 
pecting to see the city again, and certainly 
never expecting again to look on the face of 
the man who had to me been so very interest- 
ing. During that week I made discoveries 
which were surprising and painful. 

Before I refer to them it may be as well 
to indicate why to see Bushnell had been 
one of the essential things in my visit to this 
side of the ocean. There were days in my 
early ministry when doubt and faith struggled 
together in death grapple. Two subjects trou- 



HORACE BUSHNELL. 145 

bled me exceedingly : one, the nature of the 
personality of Jesus ; the other, the subject of 
miracles — especially the latter. Talking one 
day to a ministerial friend, a man of exquisitely 
refined mind and broad culture, he asked me if 
I had read a book recently imported from 
America, entitled " Nature and the Supernat- 
uraW Very soon I was occupied in reading that 
book. To me it was a wonderful book, and so 
adapted to my then condition of mind that if 
God had sent an angel from heaven to me with 
a message of deliverance from doubt, it could 
not have been more thoroughly adapted to my 
state. I had previously read a volume of ser- 
mons by this same author, entitled " Sermons 
for the New Life," and they struck me as being 
very remarkable for their devoutness and spir- 
itual force. I think that from the day I read 
that book on " Nature and the Supernatural " 
to the present hour I have had no doubts on 
the personality of Jesus, and no skepticism on 
the subject of the miracles recorded in the 
New Testament, worth notice. Now, when any 
one has done for your mind as much as Bush- 



146 HORACE BUSHNELL. 

nell did for mine, you will owe him a debt of 
gratitude which you can never pay. So much 
for the reason why I specially desired to see 
Dr. Bushnell. 

Well, some one may ask, and what kind of 
a man did you find ? With a delicacy which 
is characteristic of him, my friend in Bangor 
had written me to this effect : " You must not 
be surprised if you are a little disappointed in 
Dr. Bushnell personally. He has been a suf- 
ferer for twenty years, is very much of an 
invalid, and, if he does not take to people, is 
rather impatient and somewhat unamiable ; 
but it is disease, and not the natural disposi- 
tion of the man." So that I was prepared to 
find Bushnell a kind of wreck of his once bril- 
liant self. But I was most agreeably disap- 
pointed. The worn frame was there ; the traces 
of suffering were there. He characterized 
himself as among the " vestiges of creation.'^ 
But there was no mental feebleness. Every 
day for a week I saw him some part of the 
day. There would be a difference in his days. 
He had his good and bad days, as is the case 



HORACE BUSHNELL. 147 

with all invalids suffering as he was. But to 
me he was so amiable and good, so considerate 
and kind, so simple, so modest, yet so vigorous 
mentally, so manl}-, so beautiful in spirit, that 
among the memories of my life which have for 
me a perpetual charm that visit to Bushnell 
is one. 

The discovery that I made when in Hartford 
which to me was very surprising and painful 
was that Bushnell was regarded as something 
of a heretic, and that there had been an attempt 
to bring him before his ecclesiastical association 
for trial on the charge of heterodoxy. To hear 
from his own lips that if I wanted to be on the 
best of terms with strictly orthodox brethren 
it would be as well not to make too generous 
reference to my esteem for himself was to me 
exceedingly painful. I remember replying 
with some warmth that, much as I lacked, I 
hoped that I was not craven and mean enough 
to refuse to acknowledge my indebtedness to 
him for the removal of doubts which, if they 
had grown, would have silenced my voice as a 
minister forever, or have taken me into the 



148 HORACE BUSHNELL. 

ranks of rationalists. One of our most revered 
ministers, the Rev. Dr. Buckingham, of Spring- 
field,, a man whose orthodoxy has never had 
any suspicion cast upon it, says that Dr. Bush- 
nell was " the rarest genius and most suggestive 
preacher that for forty years ever occupied the 
pulpit among Congregationalists." I came to 
America from a country where it was a very 
rare thing indeed to meet with a minister of 
any standing among Presbyterians, Congrega- 
tionalists and Baptists who was not thor- 
oughly familiar with Bushnell's writings. I 
remember how the tears ran down the old 
man's face when I told him this. He had re- 
marked to me that a London publisher, unso- 
licited, and on whom he had no claim, had 
sent him two thousand dollars ; when I replied 
that if said publisher had sent him ten thou- 
sand dollars he would have approached nearer 
the line of honesty, it seemed incredible to him. 
^' Why, Dr. Bushnell," I remarked, "there is 
no man in America read more generally by in- 
telligent laymen, as well as ministers, in Eng- 
land than you are." He seemed incredulous, 



HORACE BUSHNELL. 149 

but I saw his lip tremble and his nostril quiver, 
and I knew he felt deeply moved by the fact 
— for a fact it was. When I wrote in English 
papers of my interviews with Bushnell, and my 
impressions of him, there was intense interest 
excited, and on my return there were more 
questions asked about Bushnell than about 
almost any other subject. 

In pursuing this subject, I will give you, 
first of all, my impressions of Bushnell per- 
sonally, and then I will refer, of course very 
briefly, to his principal books — books which 
probably would never have been written but 
for that invalidism of twenty-five years which 
laid him aside fr^m all active pastoral work. 

As to his personality, Bushnell impressed me 
as a man of sublime courage — a man of what 
the old prophets would have called " vision." 
He did not reason out truth, like a man infer- 
ring that the sun shines because he sees light 
on his path, but he saw the sun — he saw the 
truth. Not that which we have inferred from 
other things, but "that which we have seen 
and heard declare we unto you '^ was the atti- 



150 HORACE BUSHNELL. 

tude of his mind. I think that I never met a 
man who seemed to have so little between him 
and Christ. His love to Christ and his simple 
trust in him was peculiar. He had no more 
doubt that when he was let loose from this 
body he would go direct to Christ than a little 
child has when let loose from school that it 
will go straight home to its mother. He felt 
that he should know Christ the moment he set 
eyes upon him — that there was such love be- 
tween them that they could not mistake one 
another. I came away from my visit to Bush- 
nell saying to myself, " There is a man who 
believes in Christ more than he believes in any- 
thing or anybody." 

Another beautiful feature in his character 
was the fact that on the shadier side of seventy 
years of age he was as much a learner in the 
school of Christ, as much a disciple, as when 
young. His mind had not in the least become 
fixed, set, or fossilized. Now, it seems to me 
that this is one of the infallible signs of char- 
acter of the purest and genius of the highest 
order. Have you never remarked the arrange- 



HORACE BUSHNELL. 151 

ment of that string of benefits which is drawn 
out before our eyes in the one hundred and 
third Psahn : " Bless the Lord, my soul, and 
forget not all his benefits: who forgiveth all 
thine iniquities ; who healeth all thy diseases ; 
who redeemeth thy life from destruction ; who 
crowneth thee with loving-kindness and tender 
mercies; who satisfieth thy mouth with good 
things, so that thy youth is renewed like the 
eagle's " ? The administration of the Spirit of 
God to the spirit of man results in the per- 
petual renewal of youth. The second part of 
BushnelPs book on "Vicarious Sacrifice,^' en- 
titled "Forgiveness and Law," had just come 
into his hands when I saw him. 

That book, " Forgiveness and Law," was 
intended to be a revision of the last part of 
"Vicarious Sacrifice." I asked him whether 
he considered these two books as final on that 
theme. " No ; not at all," he replied ; " they 
are only suggestions. If I had more light to- 
morrow I would recall them both, or supersede 
them. That is the only truthful and devout 
attitude of a human mind." He believed that 



152 HORACE BUSHNELL. 

God was working all the time on the human 
mind, and that when a man deserved more 
light he would get it. Use what you have, 
and you will get more. He did not scruple to 
express his contempt for a man who had not 
the courage of his convictions. Men who were 
playing with truth, or flirting with it, he did 
not spare. He would have gone to the stake 
himself for what he believed rather than aban- 
don it or seem to be unfaithful to it, and he 
had no kind of respect for the weakness of 
men less true to the light that was in him. I 
believe that he did more to prevent rationalism 
getting a footing in the State of Connecticut 
than any one has any idea of. Whether we 
agree with a man or not, let us try to be fair 
to him. Let us willingly own his power and 
recognize his worth. How strange that people 
were afraid of this man — afraid of him be- 
cause they did not understand him ! 

The tenth chapter of Bushnell's " Nature 
and the Supernatural," entitled " The Charac- 
ter of Jesus Forbids his Possible Classification 
among Men," did more to prevent our theologi- 



HORACE BUSHNELL. 153 

cal students and thinking laymen in England 
from moving in the Rationalistic direction 
than any other volume or any score of volumes. 
Bushnell's influence on England has been im- 
mense, and it has been beneficial, especially 
with young men at that period when, begin- 
ning to think for themselves, they are in 
danger of moving toward that which seems 
most captivating, but is not profound. There 
has never appeared in America a man who 
answered Theodore Parker so completely as 
did Bushnell. I have personally great respect 
for Theodore Parker's courage, his benevolence, 
his faithfulness to the cause of the outcast; 
but his theological thinking is certainly not of 
a high order, and misleading. Yet he had 
force and power, and was a great controversial- 
ist. But it is pretty poor controversy which 
simply decries a man and says he is dangerous. 
The only respectable way of controversy, the 
only reputable and Christian way, is to meet 
inferior thought with superior thought. If a 
man's light is only moonshine, pour sunshine 
into his mind. If a man's stick is crooked, 



154 HORACE BUSHNELL. 

put a straight stick by the side of it. If a 
man's ideal of the nature of God or man 
is inferior, put the higher and nobler and 
purer idea by the side of it. In the long 
run, that is the only way you can get victory, 
and it is the only way in which victory ought 
to be won. Every now and again, it seems to 
me, when we are in danger of putting that 
which has been said, and even put into for- 
mulas, about Christ between ourselves and 
Christ, giving it an undue influence over us, 
God in his providence raises up some man 
who, in his faith in Christ and his love for 
him, surpasses all but the choicest and meekest 
of his generation ; and this man, whose Christ- 
liness no one can justly deny, does not view 
truths exactly as we do, but explores them and 
lets new light into them. And God does this 
for our sakes, in order that our vision may not 
be fixed on the shadow of Christ, but only on 
Christ himself. Bushnell was so confident in 
his own sincerity and in the worth of those 
opinions which made him seem to think differ- 
ently from some of his brethren, that he could 



HORACE BUSHNELL. 155 

say, "If what I am about to say should be 
stifled and killed by an orer-hasty judgment, 
it will yet rise again the third day. This feel- 
ing I have, not in exultation, it seems to me, 
not so much in the shape of defiance as in the 
shape of consolation — a soft whisper that 
lingers round me in my studies, to hold me firm 
and to smooth me into an even, uncaring spirit. 
Still, the best of all attitudes I know is this : 
Let me do the right, and let God take care of 
me. I want to be in no better hands." Con- 
troversy among brethren ought never to have 
about it the spirit and flavor of contention for 
the mastery. Men should ask themselves al- 
ways such serious questions as these : What 
good am I about to seek by this controversy ? 
How will the unrenewed and unchurched men 
of society regard it ? Will it do them good or 
evil ? Will it incline them to listen more at- 
tentively to the voice of the Church, or will it 
supply them with yet another argument for 
aloofness from and hostility toward those who, 
by their manifest love of one another, are 
Christ's disciples ? " By this shall all men 



156 HORACE BUSHNELL. 

know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love 
one to another." I am surprised oftentimes at 
the recklessness shown by men as to the effect 
which certain courses of conduct will have 
upon men of the world — men whom every 
sincere Christian wants to win for Christ and 
his church. But men ought ever to ask them- 
selves the question, What good am I going to 
do by this course ? And if the good be doubt- 
ful even, it is best to let it alone. I think with 
good Dr. Buckingham, that it would have been 
nothing short of a calamity if so eminent a 
genius as Dr. Bushnell had been driven out of 
fellowship with the brethren whom he loved 
and ardently desired to assist in everything 
which pertained to the kingdom of God. 

Let me refer briefly to his books. 

His sermons on "The New Life" are such 
as only he himself could have preached. " Na- 
ture and the Supernatural" is perhaps his 
greatest book. In it he deals with theology, 
with pantheism, with naturalism, and shows 
how nature is not a system in itself, but needs 
the supernatural to complete it. He takes up 



HORACE BUSHNELL. 157 

the fact of sin, and the consequences of sin, 
and shows how this world was anticipatively 
adapted to the training, not of perfect men, 
but of sinning men. He shows, further, that 
there is no remedy in development or self -refor- 
mation. Then he goes on to show how God 
governs the world by a supernatural method — 
and yet not against law, as the objectors say, 
but by the bringing higher supernatural laws 
to the control of the lower or natural laws. 
Then he opens his great tenth chapter on the 
superhuman personality of Christ, and shows 
how great a matter it is that one such charac- 
ter has lived in the world. He speaks of 
miracles in such a way as to make one perceive 
that they are in entire harmony with what 
went before ; that Jesus Christ is the greatest 
miracle of all, and that it is impossible to re- 
ject the miracles he did without also rejecting 
him — a fact which experience but too often 
verifies. 

Several volumes of sermons have been given 
to the press, all aglow with thought and feel- 
ing. The book on '' Vicarious Sacrifice," and 



158 HORACE BUSHNELL. 

that (supplementary to it) on " Forgiveness 
and Law," are suggestive, but not so satisfac- 
tory on the themes discussed as one would 
wish, and as he himself felt. Books entitled 
" Building Eras " and '' Work and Play " con- 
tain essays of his on their various themes that 
are of very special worth. A letter of his to 
the Pope, in one of these, is a curiosity in 
literature. A singularly original book on 
" Woman Suffrage," entitled " Kef orm against 
Nature," would be excellent for all women in- 
fected with a desire to be politicians. 

But of all useful books for our age, I am in- 
clined to give " Christian Nurture " almost the 
front place. That such a book should be neg- 
lected by fathers and mothers and churches 
is a sign that to have light given is not by any 
means the same as to have received light. 

There is a recently published "Pastoral 
Letter of the House of Bishops," in which 
the representatives of the Episcopal Church 
warn men of the consequences of the present 
condition of things in this land as regards 
family life and the neglect of Christian nur- 



HORACE BUSHNELL. 159 

ture in families. It is a long while since I 
read a document so satisfactory as far as its 
practical suggestions are concerned. Now, 
no man has treated this theme so wisely and 
with so much philosophic insight as Bush- 
nell. No one of any judgment and intelli- 
gence can take objection to anything advanced 
in "Christian Nurture.'' I believe that the 
most dangerous form of atheism in this land is 
not that which on platforms denies God's sov- 
ereignty and man's responsibility for anything 
but the free exercise of his animal powers, 
although that is dangerous enough, God knows 
— tending to multiply Anarchists and Com- 
munists, already too numerous. The most 
dangerous form of atheism is that which lurks 
in the family, emasculating and counteracting 
God's law as given on the page of revelation. 
In the last book of the New Testament the 
kind of wickedness which should devastate 
and desolate the earth is called "the mystery 
of lawlessness." No law anywhere — no law 
in the family, no law in the Church, no law in 
the nation, or only such as can be successfully 



160 HORACE BUSHNELL. 

trampled on and set at defiance. Eepudiate 
the Divine Sovereignty, and then man's sov- 
ereignty is without adequate foundation. 
Atheism in the administration of family life is 
certain to bring with it that which the prophet 
Daniel calls " the abomination which maketh 
desolate.'' I commend to all fathers and 
mothers Bushnell's book on " Christian Nur- 
ture " as pure gold. 

I must not omit one of his most thoughtful 
books, entitled " Moral Uses of Dark Things.'' 
What insight that book displays ! In it he 
treats of such themes as these : " Of Night 
and Sleep," "Of Want and Waste," "Of Bad 
Government," " Of Physical Pain," " Of Non- 
Intercourse between Worlds," " Of Things 
Unsightly and Disgusting," "Of Plague and 
Pestilence," " Of Insanity," " Of the Mutabili- 
ties of Life," and other themes. It is a book 
full of windows — windows through which 
one looks into a wide, wide area of thought 
and speculation. Bushnell was emphatically 
a thinker. He would not be called a scholar 
in the sense of a man who had scraped to- 



HORACE BUSHNELL. 161 

gether and stored up in his memory the 
thoughts of others, but his mind was alive 
all the time, and thought poured into it and 
then out of it again in new and beautiful 
forms. 

I think that I never felt so ashamed of 
preaching as when, on that second Sunday I 
spent at Hartford, Bushnell sat in the pew be- 
fore me and I had him for an auditor. It 
seemed to me that absurdity could no further 
go than that I should preach and Bushnell 
should listen. And that Sunday morning after 
service we walked together through that park 
which he had been the means of inducing the 
city of Hartford to undertake to make. The 
whole region used to be a place of refuse, and 
the brook that skirts it, now clear and sweet, 
a stream into which boys threw kittens and 
everything else they could. As he was dying, 
the city authorities unanimously voted to call 
it Bushnell Park, and the old man knew before 
he went hence that that was to be its name. 
Crowned with the marble State House, it is 
now a thing of beauty — a joy forever! I 



162 HORACE BUSHNELL. 

shall not forget that morning walk, and the 
tenderness of the man, and what he said to me 
about preaching ; I shall not forget very soon 
how he looked and how he spoke as he talked 
of his books. "These that are uttered," he 
said, "do not trouble me. It is that within 
which I cannot utter which troubles me." 
And when I looked into those eyes with that 
far-away look in them, so seldom seen, but 
once seen never forgotten, I could well believe 
that there was much in him which he could 
not get uttered. The feelings and thoughts 
of the soul were too great for language. That 
morning he said " good-by " to me, and added, 
so quietly and with such gentle pathos in his 
voice, " Well, my brother, I am glad to have 
been well enough to see you so much this 
week ; glad to know you — - 1 suppose we shall 
never meet again until we get to the other 
side." In February, 1876, he went home ; went 
home with a benediction on his lips. Very 
slowly, and with pauses intermingled — for he 
was very weak — he said : '• Well, now, we are 
all going home together ; and I say, the Lord 



HORACE BUSHXELL. 163 

be with YOU, and in grace and peace and love 
— and that is the way I have come along 
home." It was his dying benediction, spoken 
out of the almost sleep and exhaustion of his 
mind. 

"God spared his life till all men were at 
peace with him." For myself, I am of opinion 
that the day has not even yet dawned, except 
among those who knew him personally and 
intimately, in which ample justice can be done 
to the genius of Horace Bushnell. He was 
too original to be understood at first, and by 
men and women accustomed to assume that 
Bible truths could only be expressed in one 
form of words. Knowing nothing of him but 
what his books revealed, England did him 
ampler justice than he has ever here received. 
English Nonconformists are given to speak 
out their thoughts without restraint, yet I 
never once heard the orthodoxy of Bushnell 
impugned. Men there are accustomed to con- 
sider a man orthodox enough who exalts Christ 
and holds on to the inspired records faithfully. 
They never find that that kind of man does 



164 HORACE BUSHNELL. 

anything but good. However, for myself I 
owe him a great deal ; a great deal of love and 
reverence for the light he gave me on themes 
which were to me very dark. And what 
higher thing can one man do for another than 
this? 

What baser ingratitude could there be than 
for a man not to own the man whom God 
employed as a light-bearer to his soul ? Pro- 
fessor Phelps says of him, after spending a 
time with him : " He was one of God's seers. 
He was commissioned to paint the vision pre- 
cisely as he saw it on the Mount. The recep- 
tion of it by other minds was their affair, not 
his. When I came near to the inner spirit of 
the man, it was beautifully and profoundly 
Christlike, if that of uninspired man ever 
was.'' So said all who, I believe, knew him 
well. 

As the days go on, and as we ourselves 
become more Christlike in spirit, we shall find 
that there have been among the New England 
clergy few men of whom Christian brethren 
have more cause to be proud, for whom they 



HORACE BUSHNELL. 165 

have more cause to be thankful, than the man 
of all men best known among the citizens of 
Hartford, the bright and brilliant genius, the 
sincere disciple, the passionate lover of his 
Lord — Horace Bushnell. 



VIII. 
FEEDERICK DENISON MAUEICE. 

ONE is apt to assume that men whom Vv^e 
ourselves know with some degree of 
thoroughness must necessarily be well known 
by others. I was very thoroughly awakened 
to the idea that this is not so when, speak- 
ing recently to a lady and gentleman who 
move among the cultured people of the old 
city of the Puritans, they told me, with 
evident ■ sincerity and honesty, that they had 
never heard the name of Frederick Denison 
Maurice. This fact set me thinking. Here is 
a name that has appeared in reviews, maga- 
zines and newspapers — specially religious 
newspapers — quite frequently for the last 
fifty years ; a man whose inner life and whose 

166 



FKEDEKICK DENISOX MAURICE. 167 

relations to men have been set forth very 
elaborately in two biographical volumes ; a 
man who was the author of seme thirty books 
on topics relating to theology and metaphysics 
— and yet quite respectable, and to a degree 
cultured people may never have heard of him. 
In the case to which I refer the lady and gen- 
tleman belonged to a denomination in which 
F. D. Maurice is seldom, I apprehend, quoted as 
anything of an authority, or seldom at all — be- 
cause, being born into that denomination, his 
father being a minister therein, he soon worked 
his way out of it, he and his mother and his 
sisters, leaving the poor old father absolutely 
alone, in what appeared to them a land-locked 
harbor, into which no ships came with merchan- 
dise from afar, while mother, son and daughters 
set sail on wider, if more tempestuous waters. I 
confess to feeling much of sympathy and much 
of sadness for the position of that old Unitarian 
minister when his wife and every member of 
his family deserted the church of which he 
was minister because they could no longer 
feel that the truth as to God and the human 



168 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE. 

soul was there. Fancy the state of feeling 
into which that father must have been thrown 
when one morning he received this note from 
one of his daughters, in her sister's name as 
well as in her own : " We do not think it con- 
sistent with the duty we owe to God to attend 
a Unitarian place of worship," and further 
states that she cannot any longer consent to 
take tlie communion with him ! The reply of 
the father is brief, but one can feel the heav- 
ings of his heart and see the tears as they 
drop on the paper : 



My Dear Anne : 

The sensation your letter has excited in my mind 
is beyond my powers to describe. I am totally unable 
to answer it. May God enable me to perform my 
duty ! I certainly was unprepared for such a stroke. 
I should have been thankful if any previous intima- 
tion had been given. I have not acted as a father to 
whom no contidence ought to be shown. Nor have 
I refused to argue or state my reasons of belief in 
such a way as might have apprised me somewhat of 
what I expect from those who are dearer to me than 
they can imagine. But if ever they are parents they 
may then conceive the distress of 

M. Maurice. 



FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE. 169 

All tlie members of the Maurice household 
were noted for two things — their perfect pu- 
rity of feeling and their bright, keen intelli- 
gence. The subject of our brief essay seems 
to have been a saint from childhood. His 
cousin, Dr. Goodeve, the one companion of his 
boyhood who survives him, writes : " During 
our intercourse as boys I never knew him to 
commit even an ordinary fault, or apparently 
to entertain an immoral idea. He was the 
gentlest, most docile and affectionate of creat- 
ures ; but he was equally earnest in what he 
believed to be right, and energetic in the pur- 
suit of his views. It may be thought an ex- 
travagant assertion, a mere formal tribute to 
a deceased friend and companion, but, after a 
long and intimate experience of the world, I 
can say, with all sincerity, that he was the 
most saintlike individual I have ever met — 
Christlike, if I dare to use the word ! " 

His companions in boyhood have left the 
testimony that " he never said an unkind word 
nor did an unfeeling or ungenerous action to his 
companions ; yet he was untiring in work in 



170 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE. 

and out of study hours, thus easily surpassing 
his schoolfellows, yet without any assumption 
of superiority over them.'^ People are too apt 
to assume that great men develop out of bad, 
ungovernable boys, and that great thinkers are 
sure to have some terrible elements of disorder 
in their make-up. This man of whom I am 
writing is the clergyman concerning whom 
so eminent an individual as John Stuart Mill 
(whose whole up-bringing had been such as 
to create prejudice against all clergymen) is 
recorded to have remarked that there was 
one clergyman of his acquaintance " who had 
brains enough and to spare.'' 

The word "saint" has become so associated 
with a feminine or with a " goody-goody " idea 
of character, that it may be useful and refresh- 
ing to us to meet with a man in modern times 
whom everybody personally acquainted with 
him acknowledged to be saintlike and Christ- 
like in character, whatever they thought of 
his opinions, who was Platonic in intellect — a 
theological Socrates in these recent years. I 
believe that the very highest order of intel- 



FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE. 171 

lectual greatness demands also as its counter- 
part the very highest order of goodness. 

There cannot be a doubt that the influence 
of Maurice's writings on some of the choicest 
minds of the age, both in England and Amer- 
ica, has been exceedingly powerful and salu- 
tary. When men like Dean Stanley and 
Charles Kingsley and many others hardly less 
celebrated call him master, it is idle talk to 
speak slightingly of him and say that he is 
too mystical ever to be popular or influential. 
No record of modern thinkers in the church is, 
or can be at all complete which ignores the 
man whom Mr. Gladstone has called a " spirit- 
ual splendor '' — although Mr. Gladstone con- 
fesses that Maurice's order of mind is a kind 
of enigma to him. Others have felt the same. 
So celebrated a Avriter as the late Principal 
Tulloch, of Scotland, remarks how needful it 
is to study his writings to get an initial clue 
with which to begin. " Even with such a clue 
his marvelous subtlety is often evasive ; with- 
out it, it is hopeless to read a coherent meaning 
into his several writinsrs and controversies." 



172 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE. 

So that one would assume that Maurice 
could never have been a popular preacher, 
which is true. A teacher of teachers must 
necessarily have, as his first audience — the 
audience to which he speaks viva voce — a 
very limited number of people. It was so 
with Maurice. But, happily, there were pub- 
lishers ready to take and print almost every 
thing he produced, and his books found a 
sufficient number of readers, subtle as they 
were, to sell several editions of most of them, 
and the number of readers among clergymen 
is steadily increasing all the time. My own 
interest in him was aroused by an Episcopal 
clergyman who became the most intimate 
clerical friend I ever had in this world. He 
was some fifteen years my senior in age, and 
we did not see alike on ecclesiastical or theo- 
logical themes, but our mental disagreements 
seemed to have no ability to keep us apart. 
Every week we were together, generally on 
Mondays and Saturdays, he studying for his 
Sunday preaching at one desk and I at an- 
other in the same room. The world has never 



FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE. 173 

seemed the same to me since that man left it. 
And he had such unbounded reverence for 
Maurice that I could not help being interested 
in the man, though my prejudices against 
Maurice were very strong. He seemed to me 
so misty and mystical. I labored at him and 
failed to understand him. And yet I felt what 
a magnificent mind it was with which I was 
laboring. He reminded me of Plato, and of 
Hegel. Many a time I had the opportunity 
of hearing him preach, and stupidly refrained 
from going near him. I ought to have known 
that a man who had such magnetic influence 
over others must have had in him something 
out of the common, and I ought to have con- 
quered my prejudices. 

Once my friend and I went together to the 
Workingmen's College in London, of which 
Maurice was the founder. He was to speak 
to the men of that college — men of the re- 
spectable artisan class, who spent their even- 
ings there studying and improving themselves. 
Their appreciation of their founder showed 
itself in the crowd which filled the hall — 



174 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE. 

every foot of room being occupied. Suddenly 
there slipped into the room a man about mid- 
dle height, of most modest demeanor, and all 
eyes were turned to him. When he rose to 
speak the applause was spontaneous and hearty 
to a degree. What a beautiful face it was, to 
be sure! I had heard of "the angel-faced 
Maurice," but no photographic portrait seemed 
to indicate why. And I saw at once that the 
face could not be photographed. You must 
catch the expression as the man was speaking, 
or it would be of no use. And herein the im- 
mense superiority of oil painting comes out — 
the true artist catches the expression and gives 
the life. The sun has no personality in him, 
and cannot deal with personality — only with 
hard lines and light and shade. The best 
faces can never be photographed — faces with 
spiritual light in them, as if something were 
shining through them. 

Such was the face of Maurice as I saw him 
on that occasion. He spoke with great hesi- 
tancy; but every word seemed to tell, every 
word seemed saturated with soul. I was afraid 



FREDERICK DENJSON MAURICE. 175 

he would stop. There was something in the 
man and in his voice which held you. When 
we left I reproached myself : " Fool that you 
are, never to have heard this man before when 
you had had the opportunity!" 

He was then living at Cambridge (Professor 
of Moral Philosophy), and had come up to 
London for a season. I resolved to go when- 
ever I saw the name of Maurice announced 
anywhere, if it were possible. We spoke to 
him after the address, and the way in which 
he held my friend's hand in both his and 
unconsciously stroked it as he spoke to him, 
was very significant. 

The next time we went together, called by 
the announcement of the name of Maurice, 
was a very different occasion, yet not long 
after that on which we had listened to his 
voice at the Workingmen's College. It was 
by the side of the grave in Highgate Cemetery 
where the mortal investiture of this immortal 
spirit was committed to the tomb. It was a 
simple funeral, for every one knew how averse 
Maurice was to display. But it was a remark- 



176 FREDEBICK DENISON MAUKICE. 

able gathering. Tennyson was expected, but 
at the last moment could not come. Carlyle 
had begun to grow feeble, and dared not 
expose himself to the bleak winds of April. 
There were crowds lining the roads to the 
cemetery, and around the grave were men who 
seldom, if ever, all met together before — cer- 
tainly would never meet together again. 

Next to me was the tall form of Charles 
Kingsley, and then the slight figure of Dean 
Stanley; a little farther off, the hard-lined, 
thoughtful face of James Martineau, who in 
controversy had grappled, not very success- 
fully, with him who was gone. Then came 
good Dr. Alexander Ealeigh, whom, with Dr. 
Vaughan, the Congregational Union of Eng- 
land and Wales sent over here immediately 
after the Civil War as their representatives ; 
and near by was a Baptist clergyman of repute, 
who, when I was introduced, said, "What a 
meeting-place this is to-day ! '^ "I had no 
idea you were an admirer of Maurice," I re- 
marked. His reply was very significant : 
"He gave me back the Gospel." 



FREDEKICK DENISON MAUllICE. 177 

It may seem entirely out of the natural 
order of things to speak in the middle of an 
essay, of a man's funeral, but sometimes per- 
sonal reminiscences prepare the mind to be 
interested in the teaching. And while I am 
writing of Maurice's funeral, it may be justi- 
fiable if I record a simple fact in relation to 
the funeral of the friend to rv^iom I have 
referred, through whom my attention was 
called to the exceptional greatness and good- 
ness of the man whom he all but worshiped. 

He had said to his family : '•' When I die 
let my remains lie as close to those of Maurice 
as you can possibly get them." This sacred 
request was singularly provided for. When 
my friend's wife went to Highgate Cemetery to 
select the site of the grave, she mentioned her 
husband's wish. An available lot was discov- 
ered some hundreds of yards away. On her 
return she received a note from the registrar 
of the cemetery running thus : " By some unac- 
countable mistake, the lot next to that where 
repose the remains of the Rev. F. D. Maurice 
has been overlooked, and is unappropriated." 



178 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE. 

And so side by side the remains of the mas- 
ter and his disciple lie, their dust mingling in 
death as their thoughts and loves had mingled 
in life. It seems that sometimes Divine 
Providence arranges for the gratification of the 
deep heart-wishes of those who are entire be- 
lievers in it, in a most peculiar way, as in 
this case. The dearest and last wish of this 
faithful disciple of Maurice was thus granted. 

As is recorded in the biography of Maurice 
by his son : " As soon as he (whose teachings 
had been the subject of a great deal of con- 
troversy while he lived) was dead, there fol- 
lowed, both in the pulpit and in the press, 
such a burst of grateful recognition of the 
national services he had rendered as fairly 
staggered numbers who had never heard his 
name before, or had known him only under 
false conceptions of him. It was said to me 
by more than one man at the time that the 
spontaneity and universality of the feeling 
was so marked that there did not seem to 
them to have been anything like it in England 
since the Duke of Wellington's death. It was 



FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE. 179 

the more remarkable because at the moment 
scarcely a single notice came from his imme- 
diate friends. The blow to them had been too 
stunning to admit of anything but silence." 

It may now be necessary to say what con- 
stituted Maurice a teacher of teachers, and of 
what nature his teaching was. His basis 
doctrine was that God had been revealed in 
Christ as the Father of the spirit of man — of 
man everywhere ; out of this grew everything 
in his teaching. He believed that this revela- 
tion was distinct and clear in the teaching of 
Jesus Christ, and that man's ignorance of the 
fact, or his ignoring the fact, or repudiating the 
fact made no difference to the fact. If a man 
believes that the earth is flat it does not alter 
the fact that it is round. One who had heard 
him repeat in public the Lord's Prayer writes : 
" No one who ever heard Maurice read the 
Lord's Prayer can possibly forget it. The in- 
tensity of his convictions in the pulpit made his 
message seem as luminous and clear as it was 
brief and concentrated, though his teaching 
had by no means the same character." 



180 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE. 

I know how difficult it is to accept the 
teaching which seems to be that of the first 
two words of the Lord's Prayer, and aver that 
in their spirits all men are the children of 
God. I know how much is involved in it. 
So very many of the facts of life seem to 
militate against it. Maurice would ask, '' Is 
it right to teach every child the Lord's 
Prayer ? Yes or no. If yes, then the first 
two words contain the greatest of all revela- 
tions. If no, then our Lord ought to have 
limited this word ^ our ' in some way or 
other." 

Out of this view of the Fatherhood in God 
over human spirits arose consistently Maurice's 
principle of "universal redemption." No man 
ever so emphatically and resolutely proclaimed 
the greatness and completeness of the Atone- 
ment as wrought by Christ. He stood with- 
out any, even the slightest reservation on the 
text, " God was in Christ reconciling the world 
unto himself, not imputing their trespasses 
unto them." 

In a letter to his mother he sets forth the 



FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE. 181 

view he held with an earnestness that is un- 
mistakable. Perhaps that letter will help you 
to perceive how free from that timidity which 
characterizes most of us in our statements as 
to the extent and worth of the Atonement he 
is. " Now, my dearest mother," he writes, 
" you wish or long to believe yourself in 
Christ, but you are afraid to do so, because 
you think there is some experience that you 
are in him necessary to warrant that belief. 
Now, if any man, or an angel from heaven 
preach this doctrine to you, let him be 
accursed. You have this warrant for believ- 
ing yourself in Christ, that you cannot do one 
loving act, you cannot obey one of God's com- 
mandments, you cannot pray, you cannot hope, 
you cannot love, if you are not in him. . . . 
What, then, do I assert ? Is there no differ- 
ence between the believer and unbeliever ? 
Yes ; the greatest difference. But the differ- 
ence is not about the fact, but precisely in the 
belief of the fact. God tells us, ' In him (that 
is, in Christ) I have created all things, whether 
they be in heaven or on earth. Christ is the 



182 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE. 

head of every man.' Some men believe this 
— some men disbelieve it. Those men who 
disbelieve it walk after the flesh. They do 
not believe that they are joined to the Al- 
mighty Lord of life, One who is mightier 
than the world, the flesh and the Devil ; One 
who is nearer to them than their own flesh. 

. . . But though tens of hundreds of 
thousands of men so live, we are forbidden by 
Christian truth to call this the real state of 
any man. The truth is that every man is in 
Christ ; the condemnation of every man is 
that he will not own the truth, he will not 
act as if it were true that except he were 
joined to Christ he could not think, breathe, 
live, a single hour." 

Another feature in Maurice's teaching was 
the tremendous honor which he put on the 
Scriptures. His interpretation of them was 
often different from that adopted in his day, 
but he exalted them above all other religious 
writings as infinitely wiser and infinitely more 
advanced in thought. He was brought up as 
a child and youth in a system where the 



FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE. 183 

opinions of men were made much of, and when 
he came to the Scriptures it was a deliverance 
to him, and he seemed to breathe the air of 
freedom. His soul sprang into a new liberty, 
like a chick breaking the shell, and getting on 
to the copious acreage of the broad earth. 
He used to say that there was nothing 
specially difficult to him in the Scriptures, 
nothing that he could not see a reason for, 
except the destruction of the children who 
went to cry out after the prophet. That he 
always shrank from. But, as one has said, 
'^perhaps the young persecutors would have 
grown up only to be incorrigibly bad men, and 
it was a mercy to arrest them in their wicked- 
ness while young." 

A third thing characteristic of Maurice was 
his passionate desire for unity among Chris- 
tians. He was haunted all his life, he says, 
by this desire. ^'I would wish to live and 
die," he writes, "for the assertion of this 
truth : that the universal church is as much a 
reality as any particular nation is ; that the 
church is the witness for the true constitution 



184 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE. 

of man as man, a child of God, an heir of 
heaven, and taking up his pardon by baptism ; 
that the world is a miserable, accursed, rebel- 
lious order, which denies this foundation, 
which will create a foundation of self-will, 
choice, taste, opinion ; that in the world there 
can be no communion; that in the church 
there can be universal communion — ; com- 
munion in one body by one spirit." 

Another aspect of Maurice's character was 
that of a social reformer. He could not pass 
through this world simply as a literary man 
and a theologian. When gazing once on the 
picture of the Last Supper by Leonardo da 
Vinci, he complained of the smooth, girlish, 
and sentimental face of John as being out of 
keeping with the character of the man. Mr. 
Kingsley who was with him, asked him why. 
And he answered, '' Why ? Was not St. John 
the Apostle of Love ? When in such a world 
of hate and misery as this, do you not think 
that he had more furrows in his cheeks than 
all the other Apostles ? " " And," says Kings- 
ley, " I looked upon the furrows in that most 



FREDERICK DEXISON MAURICE. 185 

delicate yet most noble face, and knew that he 
spoke truth — of St. John and of himself like- 
wise — and understood better from that mo- 
ment what was meant by bearing the sorrows 
and carrying the infirmities of men." 

Every man in his own order — and when 
Maurice began to ask himself in what direc- 
tion he could move most usefully, he thought 
of the Workingmen's College, and of teaching 
men co-operation with one another. He was, 
too, the founder of Queen's College for the 
higher education of young women ; and of the 
" Girls' Home," a kind of industrial school for 
girls who, from the evil influences in their 
own homes, would be likely to fall into a 
vagrant way of life. He persuaded the ladies 
of his congregation to found this school, and 
give girls a thorough apprenticeship in house- 
hold work — lessons in the business of the 
housemaid, the parlormaid, and the cook, and 
in all kinds of plain needlework, combined 
with lessons in reading, writing, arithmetic, 
singing, together with education in the Script- 
ures — which lessons he thought would be 



186 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE. 

more prized and better remembered when as- 
sociated with a school which aimed to give a 
preparation for the practical duties of life. 
" Every congregation/' he says, " which meets 
to worship God and to join in communion 
seems pledged to do something for the neigh- 
borhood in which it is placed." 

Men were somewhat afraid of him, because 
he did not repudiate, but rather accepted the 
name of a " Christian Socialist." He felt that 
if Christian clergymen would put themselves 
in right relations to the people, and do it in 
Christ's name and spirit, the people would 
follow them and be guided by them. " Then 
and always throughout life he looked upon it 
as essential to the cause of the poor that they 
should learn the impotence of lawlessness and 
riot," and that they should be so instructed as 
to win what they had a right to by reason and 
intelligence, and by no baser methods. But 
he held that anything would be better for 
England than that it should degenerate into a 
nation of mere moneygetters. No one knew 
better than he that every nation reaps what it 



FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE. 187 

SOWS, and that if the people became riotous 
and mutinous it would be because the more 
intelligent and better circumstanced peo- 
ple had failed to do their duty to them, and 
had been occupied selfishly about their own 
concerns. 

Among other efforts of his to diffuse truth, 
he caused to be published for a time a paper 
called " Politics for the People," but he could 
give very little personal supervision, and the 
paper never grew to what it might have been. 
Many strifes between employers and employed 
were appeased by his influence, or by the 
kindly intervention of those who looked to 
him as their leader. 

I think that Maurice will come to be es- 
teemed more and more as a great Christian 
philosopher. He regarded everything in the 
light of certain admitted principles. Until he 
got to the divine ground of things and thoughts 
he was restless and dissatisfied. He seems to 
have traversed the whole field of philosophy 
in search of truth. His books on ancient and 
modern philosophy indicate an amount of 



188 FKEDERICK DENISON MAURICE. 

steady, persevering reading through endless 
volumes which one would think would take all 
the time in a single lifetime. His work-power 
was enormous. But then he had splendid 
health, and he knew how to take care of it. 
His habits were regular. His domestic life is 
said, by those who knew it best, to have been 
singularly happy. He married the sister of 
John Sterling, the young man of genius whose 
biography — a very one-sided production — 
Carlyle wrote ; and, a few years after she was 
removed from this world, a sister of Julius 
Hare's, another man of literary note, became 
to Maurice a true helpmeet. These cultured, 
intelligent, refined women seem to have un- 
derstood him completely, and his children, 
one of whom has shown himself a biographer 
worthy of his eminent father, were real bene- 
dictions. Singularly happy in his home, he 
had, as every original thinker who takes any 
prominent part in the controversies of his day 
must have, quite a number of intellectual 
battles to fight outside. With Candlish, the 
Scottish divine, as to the extent of the idea of 



FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE. 189 

the divine fatherhood ; with Mansel, the meta- 
physician, who contended that justice and 
mercy in God might be quite something else 
than justice and mercy in man — to which 
Maurice replied, "Then virtually we have no 
God;" with Dr. Jelf, the Principal of King's 
College, and some others, Maurice was forced 
into controversy ; but that was not his spirit 
and temper at all. It was alleged against him 
that because he said the word " eternal " as 
used in the Xew Testament (for instance, in 
such a passage as this : " This is life eternal, 
to know thee, the only true God, and Jesus 
Christ whom thou hast sent ") meant primar- 
ily something profounder than everlasting; 
namely, life as it is in God — that his teaching 
must necessarily lead to what is called Univer- 
salism ; but since the publication of his biog- 
raphy the Universalists have looked upon him 
with much less favor than formerly. One of 
his most intimate friends, who knew his mind 
most sympathetically, writes : " Maurice says 
he cannot see the doctrine of the restoration 
of all fallen beings, and thinks that if it be so, 



190 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE. 

we need a revelation to declare it. He seems 
to think (if I understand him rightly) that it 
may be possible for a being to exercise his 
own free will in resisting God till it becomes 
impossible for him to be inilaenced by any 
good." Of course that and similar quotations 
dispose of the charge of Universalism. It is 
true he refuses to use the word " eternal " as 
a synonym for the word "everlasting"; but 
that is an entirely different matter. 

His life was singularly complete. At 
seventy years of age he passed away. Just 
before he died he said, " If I may not preach 
here, I may preach in other worlds." Through- 
out his illness he was continually speaking of 
sacrifice ; of Christ's sacrifice being at the root 
of all things. He hardly ever woke in the 
night, either in health or when he was sick, 
without repeating the Lord's Prayer or the 
Benediction, or " Praise God, from whom all 
blessings flow." 

On the morning on which he died he seemed 
to know the end was near ; he seemed to make 
a great effort to gather himself up, and after 



FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE. 191 

a pause said, slowly and distinctly : " The 
knowledge of the love of God — the blessing 
of God Almighty — the Father, the Son, and 
the Holy Ghost — be amongst you — amongst 
us — and remain with us forever." 

He never spoke again. In one instant- all 
consciousness was gone. Into the realm of 
light and love he went — this man, as John 
Stuart Mill said, who had intellect enough 
and to spare — this "spiritual splendor," as 
Gladstone called him — this man whom Kings- 
ley always addressed as "My dear Master" — 
this man concerning whom the undergraduates 
of Cambridge said that they always felt better 
all day for seeing him pass — this man whom 
servants and poor people whom he visited 
spoke of as "beautiful," "'the angel-faced 
Maurice," the theological Plato of the nine- 
teenth century. 



iO 



